Category Archives: American history

Beginning of the end of a life of violent crime: the story of John Dillinger’s first hideout in Chicago at 3512 North Halsted on March 3, 1934, to his being killed at the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934, by the FBI.

FEATURE IMAGE: On March 3, 1934, John Dillinger (left in a mug shot) used the second floor of this three-flat building on Chicago’s north side as his first hide out after he and another criminal, murderer Henry Youngblood, drove directly here from a jail in Crown Point, Indiana following their break-out. In January 1934 Dillinger had been extradited to Indiana from Arizona. Public domain. Author’s photograph. May 2014.

In the Great Depression many banks had failed wiping out entire savings of millions of ordinary Americans. Banks that stayed open saw their primary business becoming foreclosures on ordinary American’s homes, farms, and businesses. And the economy was not improving. Bank robberies were viewed by some as a sort of just retribution in desperate times or even sometimes more favorably since bank robberies could involve the destruction of bank records, including mortgages, so that the bank could not as easily foreclose. There was a myth of the glamorous getaway involving handsome celebrity robbers. Such was the story of John Dillinger (1903-1934) with his gangs including Harry “Pete” Pierpont, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis, John “Red” Hamilton, and Homer Van Meter and their girlfriends. John Dillinger, declared Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI in June 1934, epitomized the early 1930’s Depression-era bank robber in America as he terrorized the Midwest following his release from jail from September 1933 until July 1934. In this period other robbers included “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde who died in a hail of gunfire in May 1934 as these territorial and nomadic robbers’ crime sprees were splashed across newspaper headlines that the public consumed like that week’s latest movie serial.

FBI photograph of the Biograph Theater in 1934 shortly after the shooting of Public Enemy No.1, John Dillinger. Public Domain

New federal anticrime laws targeted interstate criminals that made bank robbery, the transport of stolen goods or the flight of a felon over state lines, a federal crime and came under the jurisdiction of the FBI. That is where this three-flat in Chicago enters criminal and criminal law history. About midway between Lake Michigan and Wrigley Field in Chicago sits John Dillinger’s Hideout, a red brick three-flat at 3512 N. Halsted in the Uptown neighborhood. After his Indiana jail break on Saturday, March 3, 1934, John Dillinger, with murderer Henry Youngblood, headed directly to Chicago and hid out for one night in this building. Dillinger stayed on the second floor of an apartment owned by Frances “Patsy” Frechette, the half-sister of Dillinger’s girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette (1907-1969). This break out gave FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover his first big chance to apply federal anticrime laws after Dillinger broke out of the “escape-proof” jail in Crown Point, Indiana, having used a fake gun, stole Sheriff Lillian Holley’s car and drove the 50 miles or so across state lines to this building in Chicago, Illinois. Dillinger violated the Dyer Act and put himself in the jurisdictional sights of the FBI. On March 7, 1934, Hoover mounted a special operation to capture Dillinger, dead or alive, that would come to a successful, and bloody, conclusion on the evening of July 22, 1934, outside the Biograph Theater, about a mile and half straight south from this site. On a swelteringly hot night, Dillinger went to the air-conditioned movies and, having been set up there by the “Woman in Red,” would find himself hours later chilling in a morgue.

John Dillinger mug shot. Public domain.

Dillinger started early in a life of crime so that when he was 21 years old, he was serving what would be a nine-year sentence in an Indiana prison for robbery. Originally from Mooresville, Indiana, near Indianapolis, Dillinger and Chicago were paired for much of his adult criminal life. He joined the US Navy in Chicago in 1923 to escape an auto theft rap in Indiana. But 6 months later Dillinger gave up the ship, the USS Utah, and was dishonorably discharged. He was behind bars for that nine-year sentence for robbery starting in fall of 1924. When he was paroled in 1933, the ex-con turned to a life of violence as a bank robber. During his final 10-month crime spree Dillinger and his gang killed at least 10 people including a sheriff during one of their three jail breaks, and wounded seven more.

John Dillinger (left) with navy buds. Public domain.

To go from this hideout on March 3, 1934, to Dillinger’s death on July 22, 1934, was nearly half of Dillinger’s final 10-month episodic crime spree. In late January 1934 Dillinger and Billie and most of his gang was in Tucson, Arizona, with Dillinger checking escape routes to Mexico. Some of the gang was on the lam from a bank robbery in East Chicago, Indiana. Caught by local police, Dillinger was extradited by airplane to Indiana via Chicago and jailed in Crown Point, Indiana. It was there that he first hired Louis P. Piquett, a Chicago attorney known for close ties to the Chicago mob. Billie Frechette visited Dillinger at Crown Point in mid-February 1934. But, on March 3, 1934, Dillinger broke out of the jail and remained free until his death in late July 1934 at the hands of law enforcement.

3512 North Halsted, Chicago. Author’s photograph. May 2014.

There are many hideouts for Dillinger and his gang as they were highly peripatetic. But this hideout is significant since it is the first hideout for Dillinger on his final way to capture and death as Public Enemy No. 1 but also an American folk anti-hero. Dillinger arrived at the apartment of Patsy Frechette to hide out and reunite with Billie after crossing the state line in the stolen sheriff’s car. Dillinger was here for a significant rendezvous and transition though for too short a time for any law enforcement raid occurring at this specific address during his stay. The hideout is just steps – a literal 3-minute walk – from the long-established (1872) 42nd Precinct “Town Hall” police station. Instead, the FBI’s first major violent confrontation with the Dillinger gang following his escape took place weeks later at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin in April 1934.

The next day, March 4, 1934, Dillinger set out for Minneapolis with Billie and rented an apartment (the Indiana sheriff’s stolen car was ditched in Edgewater) at Lincoln Court Apartments, Unit 303, at 95 Lexington Parkway in St Paul. On March 6, 1934, escaped con man Dillinger driving a 1934 Packard robbed a bank in Sioux Falls, North Dakota with gang members Homer Van Meter, Eddie Green, Tommy Carroll, and Baby Face Nelson. In the robbery a policeman was wounded and the gang took almost $50,000 ($1.2 million in 2026). One week later, on March 13, 1934, Dillinger, driving a Buick, robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa, with the same gang members plus John Hamilton. Taking $52,000 in cash ($1.25 million today), a bystander was wounded as was Dillinger and Hamilton who returned to St. Paul for medical attention. That same day (March 14, 1934), Henry Youngblood, the murderer who escaped prison with Dillinger less than two weeks before, was shot and killed by law enforcement in Michigan. A deputy sheriff was killed in the capture.

1934 Green Packard. “1934 Packard” by Rennett Stowe is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Two days later, March 16, 1934, Dillinger and Billie return to Chicago. Days later he and Billie are back in St. Paul living together in the apartment under an alias (rent is $60 a month – about $1440 today). The criminal bank robber Dillinger drove to Ohio to see if he could spring from jail his mentor and partner Harry Pierpoint who had an impending death sentence but Pierpont, on October 17, 1934, was executed in the electric chair. On March 30, 1934, Dillinger was back in St. Paul with Billie and his gang members with girlfriends. At the same time, the FBI was tipped off as to Dillinger’s whereabouts and when three agents arrived at the apartment to investigate on March 31, 1934, Dillinger and Billie escaped though Dillinger was wounded in the leg. He sought medical attention across town in Minneapolis where he recovered during the next week though Eddie Green was shot and mortally wounded. The FBI, hot on Dillinger’s trail, raided the house of Dillinger’s half-brother Hubert in Indianapolis after Dillinger and Billie bought a car there with hot money and listed Hubert’s address as theirs. On Monday, April 9, 1934, Dillinger and Billie were back in Chicago where Billie was arrested at 416 North State as Dillinger escaped. Billie was held on a $60,000 bond ($1.44 million today) in response to the pair’s fleeing that shootout with law enforcement in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her trial in May 1934 resulted in a conviction. By Friday, April 13, 1934, Dillinger with Homer Van Meter had robbed a police supply station in Warsaw, Indiana, and stole firearms (Dillinger was partial to .38 revolvers throughout his career) and bulletproof vests.

Billie Frechette (1907-1969) was born on a Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. After her arrest she was tried and convicted of violating a federal law of harboring a criminal and served a two-year prison sentence without parole in a federal pen in Milan, Michigan. Public domain.

FBI wanted poster for Billie Frechette. Public Domain.

The next day Dillinger and Van Meter were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where they broke into a tourist camp and stayed in a cabin for a few days. Dillinger then drove to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan with John Hamilton. Meanwhile Homer Van Meter, Marie Comforti, and Pat Reilly arrived at Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish, Wisconsin where that evening of Friday, April 20, 1934, Dillinger, Hamilton, and others arrived for a three-day paid stay. The lodge was owned and built in 1929 by a Dillinger friend. The proprietor’s wife, hoping to secure the FBI’s $10,000 reward for Dillinger’s capture (about $250,000 today), tipped off law enforcement on many fronts after an elaborate feint of trust/ mistrust among the lodge’s owners and Dillinger’s gang. The G-men immediately chartered two airplanes full of agents from St. Paul and Chicago to Rhinelander Airport. Agents in communities surrounding the lodge were summoned to assist in the raid. There were complications: the weather was bad (snow and ice), and the agents on arrival found they had only one car when they needed 6 or 7. Meanwhile Dillinger announced he changed plans and was leaving the Lodge early. After renting cars agents arrived by nightfall of April 22, 1934, and surrounded the lodge on foot. The agents were protected by bulletproof vests and armed with machine guns, revolvers, and tear gas.

Little Bohemia Lodge where the FBI bungled the capture of Dillinger on April 22, 1934, and killed an innocent guest. It was a human and public relations disaster for the newly minted federal law enforcement group. Built in 1929, bullet holes can still be seen from that night in the northern Wisconsin lodge building today. “Little Bohemia Lodge” by nanaze is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Inside the Lodge, it was Sunday night and the bar was busy with patrons. John Morris and Eugene Boiseneau, two young CCC workers, and a gas station attendant named John Hoffman had just finished their Sunday dinner and were about to leave. The snow in the night obscured everyone’s vision and when they approached the exit of the lodge they were ordered to halt by the FBI who thought they were Dillinger and his gang. The FBI soon opened fire. Their bullets pierced the car’s steel and hit its three occupants – wounding Morris and Hoffman and killing Boiseneau.

Mug shot of Lester Gillis, aka “Baby Face” Nelson. On July 22, 1934, Dillinger was ambushed and killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater in Lincoln Park, Chicago. The next day the FBI announced that “Pretty Boy” Floyd was now Public Enemy No. 1. On October 22, 1934, Floyd was killed in a shootout with agents including Melvin Purvis. Subsequently, J. Edgar Hoover announced that Nelson was now Public Enemy No. 1. Unlike Dillinger who could be polite, the owners of the Little Bohemia Lodge thought Nelson was a “psychopath.” He died from gunshot wounds sustained in a fierce shootout with FBI agents on November 27, 1934, near Barrington, Illinois, though he managed to kill both agents. Fleeing, Nelson died in a safe house in Wilmette, Illinois. Public domain.

This gunfire alerted Dillinger inside the lodge playing cards to law enforcement’s presence. Agents then surrounded the Little Bohemia Lodge and opened fire with a hailstorm of bullets believing Dillinger and his gang inside. But Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, John Red Hamilton and Tommy Carroll escaped as did Baby Face Nelson who killed one agent and left the proprietor and wife with their other guests to suffer the carnage. The FBI left emptyhanded but for some of the gang’s girlfriends who surrendered without incident.

Head of the FBI case in Chicago to get Dillinger and his gang dead or alive was Melvin Purvis. Public domain.

Later that day (April 23, 1934), Dillinger, Van Meter and Hamilton engaged in a gun battle with police in Hastings, Minnesota, near St. Paul. When Hamilton was wounded Dillinger drove back to Chicago but failed to get him medical attention so that, a few days later, Hamilton died in Aurora, Illinois, and was buried by Dillinger and others in a gravel pit near Oswego, Illinois. The getaway car Dillinger stole in Wisconsin that night after escaping the lodge was found blood stained in Chicago at 3333 North Leavitt on May 2, 1934. The raid, led by FBI chief in Chicago Melvin Purvis (1903-1960), who liked publicity, was heavily criticized in the press for the agents’ brutal methods and stupidity and was one of the worst public relations fiascos in FBI history.

John “Red’ Hamilton. Mug shot. Public domain.

With the FBI in hot pursuit of Dillinger and his gang, episodes of violence occurred between law enforcement and gang members and other criminals throughout the Chicago area where people were killed. Dillinger, who had become an internationally known superstar criminal, had been thinking about getting plastic surgery to conceal his identity. His legal counsel, Louis P. Piquett, put Dillinger in touch with an off-the-books operating room by way of James Probasco, another of Piquett’s clients. The surgery price was high and almost all profit for Probasco: $80,000 cash (about $2 million today). Probasco recruited Dr. William Loeser, a German immigrant who fled to Mexico to escape serving time for violating the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1914 and developed a procedure to remove fingerprints. He was assisted by Dr. Harold Cassidy. Dillinger moved into Probasco’s home on Chicago’s north Crawford Road (now Pulaski Road) on May 27, 1934. The surgery took place the next day, with Dillinger opting to receive a general anesthetic. But a glitch in its application (Dillinger was swallowing his own tongue) made him choose a local anesthetic. For the next several hours, the doctors removed a mole from his forehead, dimple from his cheek, and changed the shape of his face and erased seams in his cheeks. They employed Loeser’s acid method to burn off Dillinger’s fingerprints.

Tavern owner James Probasco’s house at 2509 N. Crawford Road in Chicago where Dillinger underwent plastic surgery on May 28, 1934. Public domain.

The surgery, however, was more cosmetic than plastic so that Dillinger was still completely recognizable and his fingerprints remained after he recovered. James Probasco, four days after Dillinger’s death, on July 26, 1934, was brought under questioning for this episode by the FBI at the Bankers’ Building in downtown Chicago. Mysteriously, a window was open and Probasco leapt to his death falling onto the pavement. Attorney Louis Piquett went on trial for harboring a fugitive (Dillinger) but was found not guilty. In 1936, Piquett was retried for the same charge regarding Homer van Meter. Found guilty he served two years in prison, was fined $10,000, and disbarred in Illinois. In 1950, Piquett was pardoned by President Truman. Dr. Loeser was sentenced to one day in prison but had to serve 18 months for the Harrison narcotics case from which he fled. Dr. Cassidy received probation, served honorably in the army medical corps in World War II, but in 1946 had a breakdown and committed suicide.

“All My Life I wanted to be a bank robber. Carry a gun and wear a mask. Now that it’s happened, I guess I’m just the best bank robber they ever had. And I am sure happy.” – John Dillinger. On the alley wall in Chicago near the Biograph Theater where the bank robber was captured, dead, by law enforcement.

On June 22, 1934, the same day Dillinger was officially named Public Enemy No. 1, the high-profile criminal celebrated his 31st birthday with his new girlfriend, 26-year-old Polly Hamilton (1908-1969) at the French Casino nightclub in The Rainbo [sic] Building, 4812-4836 North Clark Street, in Chicago’s Uptown. A former employee and friend of brothel madam Anna Sage (1889-1947), Polly Hamilton met Dillinger at a Chicago nightclub in early June 1934 when she was working as a waitress and prostitute.

Polly Hamilton. Fair use.

The Rainbo, like many entertainment venues, struggled during the Great Depression. For a few months in 1934, the second year of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, the Rainbo Casino reopened as the “French Casino” (the building was demolished in 2003). A few days later (June 26, 1934), as Dillinger was watching the Chicago Cubs beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in Wrigley Field, his gang members, as informants increasingly came forward, were being squeezed around the city and in the Midwest by law enforcement, whether by being killed, or captured and tried. On June 30, 1934, Dillinger, driving a Hudson, with Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson and John Paul Chase pulled off their last bank heist in South Bend, Indiana, stealing $30,000 (over $700,000 today). One police officer was killed in the melée as a bank cashier, vice president, a bystander and a motorist, as well as Van Meter, were wounded.

Wanted poster: John Dillinger, published by U.S. Department of Justice. Public domain. Special Collections at Wofford College “[Recto] Wanted poster: John Dillinger, published by U.S. Department of Justice” by Special Collections at Wofford College is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In July Dillinger began the month discussing Billie’s appeal, going to the movies, and attending the Chicago Century of Progress. On July 22, 1934, Anna Sage (the “Woman in Red”) contacted FBI head Melvin Purvis at 5:30 p.m. to inform him that Dillinger and their mutual friend, Polly Hamilton would be going to the movies that evening either at the Biograph Theater at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park or at the palatial Marbro Theatre at 4110 W. Madison Street in West Garfield Park (the theater was demolished in 1964 and in 2026 its site remains an empty parking lot).

Anna Sage, “the woman in red” who set up John Dillinger to be shot outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. Public domain.

At 8.15 p.m. Dillinger arrived at the Biograph Theater wearing a straw hat, white shirt, gray tie, white canvas shoes and gray trousers with Sage and Polly. When they entered the Biograph Theater to see “Manhattan Melodrama” with Clark Gable, 15 federal agents (according to the next day’s headline in the Altoona Tribune), including five East Chicago officers, descended on the area and staked it out. A little after 10:30 p.m. when the show emptied out, Sage, who was dressed in a bright orange-red dress, alerted officers to Dillinger’s identity in the crowd. Ambushed and shot without warning, Dillinger was killed instantly when two shots hit the face, one bullet exiting beneath the right eye. Witnesses described Dillinger being shot at very close range. The event caused a spectacle, with many onlookers dipping handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in his blood.

Dillinger’s body after the shooting was transported to Alexian Brothers Hospital at West Belden and North Racine Avenues (above). It then went to the Cook County morgue at West Polk and South Wood streets where large crowds gathered. There, an impromptu public display of the body took place, where thousands of the general public shambled by. A plaster death mask was made of the dead criminal at the morgue. See – Medical – Hospitals – Chicago History In Postcards – retrieved Jan. 24, 2026. Fair Use.

Dillinger’s remains were taken back to Mooresville, Indiana by Dillinger’s father, half-brother, and their undertaker who came to fetch it out from the crowds. In Indiana, Dillinger was identified by his sister and then buried on July 25, 1934, in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Anna and Polly had escaped Dillinger’s capture unharmed and relocated temporarily to Detroit. Sage collected the $5,000 reward (about $120,000 today) from the FBI but, two years later, was deported to Romania due to her conviction for operating a brothel where she died on April 25, 1947. Polly Hamilton moved back to Chicago under an assumed name, married, and died in 1969.

SOURCES

John Dillinger: Bank Robber or Robin Hood? – Crime Library – retrieved Jan. 22, 2026

Uptown Update: Notorious Uptown – retrieved Jan 22 2026

23rd District Police Station, Weather Underground Target, … | Flickr – retrieved Jan 22, 2026.

Vintage Chicago Tribune: John Dillinger’s final days — and the ‘Lady in red’ who helped trap him – Chicago Sports Today – retrieved Jan. 22, 2026.

History – LITTLE BOHEMIA LODGE – retrieved Jan. 23, 2026.

April 1934 – Dillinger LLC – retrieved Jan. 23, 2026.

The Chicago Crime Scenes Project: Dillinger’s Plastic Surgery on Pulaski Rd. (or Crawford Ave.?) – retrieved Jan. 23, 2026.

The Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal™ : The Rainbo Building’s History, 4812-4836 North Clark Street, Chicago (Uptown Community), Illinois. – retrieved Jan. 23, 2026.

John Dillinger | Notable People Buried at Crown Hill Cemetery | Crown Hill Foundation | Indianapolis – retrieved Jan. 23, 2026.

Edyth Gertrude “Polly” Hamilton Black (1908-1969) – Find a Grave Memorial – retrieved Jan. 24, 2026.

http://www.historictwincities.com/2019/12/05/lincoln-court-apartments-st-paul/ – retrieved Jan. 25, 2026.

From Prose to Patriotism: How Thomas Paine’s Writings Defined and Emboldened the American Revolutionary Cause, 1776-1783.

Leave a reply

FEATURE Image: Thomas Paine, by engraver William Sharp (1749-1824), after portrait painter George Romney (1734-1802), 1793. NGA, London. Public Domain. See – https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw35502/Thomas-Paine?LinkID=mp03422&search=sas&sText=thomas+paine&role=sit&rNo=6 – retrieved June 1, 2024.

Thomas Paine’s writing served as a vital tool of psychological resilience and ideological conviction for the American Revolutionary cause during its absolute darkest hours. By juxtaposing the crushing military losses, near-total collapse of Washington’s army, and pervasive British contempt against the defiant, stirring language of The American Crisis, Paine’s prose transformed a desperate military retreat into an unyielding, spiritually justified struggle for freedom.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The American Crisis, 19 December 1776.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. The American Crisis, 19 December 1776.

Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. The American Crisis, 19 December 1776.

The Fall of Manhattan and the Jersey Chase

With the capture of Manhattan, British Army Commander in Chief William Howe sent Cornwallis to pursue Washington into New Jersey just sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Washington’s army was down almost 90% in December 1776 (3500 soldiers) from just August 1776. Washington just escaped Cornwallis’ grasp. As the British set up a line of forts to house and feed their soldiers during winter, Washington was the outsider.

British Confidence and the “Undisciplined Rabble”

The British believed the end of the revolution of what they called “despised” and “undisciplined rabble” which Virginia planter George Washington led (by way of the efforts of troublemaker Massachusetts lawyer John Adams), was in hand. Paine’s writing took that fragmented group and gave them a shared, elevated vocabulary of sacred duty (“celestial an article as freedom”), fundamentally expressing how they viewed their own struggle.

The Captive General and the Low Ebb of the War

The British entered into winter by taking prisoner Charles Lee, one of Washington’s senior generals in the Continental army, and locked him up as well as their own fleet in Newport, Rhode Island which they took without resistance. The British kept Lee’s horse perpetually drunk out of spite for the Americans. Before Washington’s important crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 and surprised the mercenary Hessians, Washington’s first comeback victory, it was the lowest ebb of the war. Since July 1776, Howe had taken almost 5000 men as P.O.W.’s, including 4 generals, and hundreds of artillery pieces and many tens of thousands of rounds of Washington’s ammunition in the wake of winning battles. When Washington’s army had lost these men and material to General Howe, Paine’s prose provided the ideological “ammunition” that kept the rebellion alive.

Thomas Paine and the Times That Try Men’s Souls

It was then that 39-year-old Thomas Paine, serving in Washington’s army, wrote this propaganda tract (his Common Sense appeared earlier in January) that began with the famous line. “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.” This was Paine’s most explosive year. When he published Common Sense in January 1776, it fundamentally shifted public sentiment away from trying to reconcile with Britain and toward demanding total independence. He followed this in December 1776 with the first volume of The American Crisis, rallying a collapsing army.

A Sober Assessment from Washington

Washington wrote about the same events more soberly: “Our affairs are in a very bad way . . . the game is pretty near up—owing in a great measure to the insidious arts of the enemy.” Paine provided the psychological “engine” to reverse the momentum when the physical war was at its lowest ebb.

SOURCES: CHAPTER THREE. “The Peace Commissioners? THE HOWE BROTHERS,” The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History), Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 96.

The Sustained Campaign (1776–1783)

The American Crisis was not just a single essay; it was a series of 16 pamphlets published continuously throughout the entire span of the Revolutionary War. He wrote them in real-time as the conflict evolved, continuously boosting morale, clarifying the ideological stakes, and countering British peace overtures.

Paine officially closed the Crisis papers on April 19, 1783—exactly eight years to the day after the war began at Lexington and Concord—famously declaring, “The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” Shortly after, in 1787, he left America to return to Europe, shifting his literary focus to the French Revolution.

Your failure is, I am persuaded, as certain as fate. America is above your reach….her independence neither rests upon your consent, nor can it be prevented by your arms. In short, you spend your substance in vain, and impoverish yourself without hope. To the People of England, The American Crisis: PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 21, 1778. see- https://www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-07.htm – retrieved June 5, 2024.

The Shifting Tide: From Despair to Strategic Defiance

As the Continental Army endured, The American Crisis evolved into a masterclass in psychological warfare. Following the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, Paine framed British territorial gains as a costly logistical trap that amounted to eventual defeats.

Turning the Tables on the Empire

By 1778, bolstered by a French alliance, Paine wrote as the intellectual superior of a fading global power. By 1780, he contrasted the comfortable lives of British soldiers in America with the burdens borne by ordinary American farmers and laborers.

The Glorious Accomplishment

In the spring of 1783, Paine concluded his final Crisis pamphlet celebrating the revolution’s success, famously declaring that the times that tried men’s souls were over and framing America’s birth as a triumph.

Why America’s Racial Crisis Was a Moral Crisis: The Enduring Vision of C.T. Vivian (1924-2020).

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: Rev. C.T. Vivian. PHOTO: CC BY-SA 4.0

President Barack Obama delivers the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Cordy Tindell “C.T.” Vivian, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Nov. 20, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)/ Public Domain.

America’s racial crisis was not fundamentally a Black problem but a moral, institutional, and historical failure of the nation itself. True freedom and justice require transforming the attitudes and structures that sustain racial inequality, and nonviolent action is the most powerful means of achieving that transformation.

Early Life and Foundations

Rev. C.T. Vivian died on July 17, 2020 at 95 years old. Rev. Vivian was born in Boonville, Missouri, and migrated as a child with his mother to Macomb, Illinois. Rev. Vivian grew up to attend Western Illinois University (WIU) in Macomb, Illinois, where he worked as the sports editor for the student newspaper. In 1987, decades after attending the university, Rev. Vivian received an honorary doctorate from WIU.

Entering the Civil Rights Arena

Rev. Vivian’s career as an activist began in Peoria, Illinois, where, in 1947, he participated in sit-in demonstrations to successfully integrate Barton’s Cafeteria. Soon after, he served with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr. and joined Dr. King’s executive staff. In that capacity, Rev. VIvian served as the national director of affiliates for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Evaluating Black Power and the Christian Faith

In the mid1960’s Rev. Vivian organized and directed efforts to re-evaluate activist networks and goals and the ideology and practice of Black Power, as well as the role of Christian faith among its participants.

The Urban Training Center and “The Plunge”

In 1965, Rev. C.T. Vivian became Director of Fellowships and Internships of the Urban Training Center (UTC) for Christian Mission in Chicago. Founded with a grant from the Ford Foundation in 1963 to train African American Christian pastors and organizers—Rev. Jesse Jackson was among the first 19 men trained under Rev. Vivian’s program at the UTC in its first year—the organization considered new dimensions to protest movements in Chicago concerned with Black power, Black identity and Black unity.

By means of lectures, readings, discussions and nonviolent training exercises such as “the Plunge” where participants had to survive on their own for seven days without access to housing, food, or other resources, the organization existed to help its participants to seek ways to take power from structures which affect their lives particularly on the West and South Sides of Chicago.

Authoring the Post-King Era

In 1970, following the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, Rev. Vivian became the first of Dr. King’s staff to write a book based on his experiences in the civil rights movement. Rev. Vivian’s book was entitled Black Power and the American Myth.

Theological Leadership and Community Banking

Rev. Vivian eventually became director of the Urban Theological Institute at Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of African-American seminaries. He was also board chair of Capitol City Bank, a minority-owned bank founded in 1995 that focused on loans for underserved areas. With eight branches in metro Atlanta, Capitol City Bank closed in 2015.

A Legacy of Youth Leadership and National Honors

Through the C.T. Vivian Leadership Institute founded in 2008, Rev. Vivian continued to do the kind of work he did in Chicago in the 1960’s which was facilitating mainly youth who were seeking discerned strategies for their material and spiritual goals. On behalf of at-risk youth and college graduates, Rev. Vivian fostered innovative leadership for their career development in the 21st century. In 2012, Rev. Vivian returned to serve as interim President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, in 2013, President Obama awarded Rev. Vivian the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Photograph: C.T. Vivian, Harry Belafonte (1927-2023), Rev. Joseph Lowery (1921-2020). “Photograph: Harry Belafonte, Rev. Joseph Lowery, and C.T. Vivian” by pflegerarchives is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Nonviolence was both strategy and transformation. Rev. C.T. Vivian presents nonviolence as a source of power that confronts fear with courage and hate with love while simultaneously creating a new social order.

PHOTO: CC BY-SA 4.0

To all who accepted it, nonviolence offered new power. It pitted calm courage against frantic fear. It set the action of love against the reaction of hate.

Nonviolence was a method which at once began to end the old and create the new.

America was born as a revolutionary nation.

The United States began with a struggle for civil rights. The specific issue – taxation without representation – was merely a focus for the larger question of whether or not a dominant majority would continue to exploit a subject minority. The American colonists decided that this oppression was not tolerable.

Among other models of social action was the American Revolution itself.

The question always before the Black man was: What must I do to be free?

Martin Luther King Jr. elevated civil rights into a moral issue. According to Rev. Vivian, Dr. King moved the struggle beyond economics and politics and placed it within a moral and spiritual framework.

It was Martin Luther King who removed the Black struggle from the economic realm and placed it in the moral and spiritual context.

When Martin Luther King emerged, he raised the issues from the pragmatic to the sublime.

As a nation, America had steadfastly refused to accept the humanity of its Black minority. It had perpetrated an endless series of horrors more ghastly than most of its citizens could imagine or believe

Racism was created to justify injustice. C.T. Vivian believed that racism developed as a rationalization for slavery and exploitation, allowing Americans to reconcile oppression with their conscience.

Racism began as rationalization. It began as a justification of the white man’s injustice to the Black. The greed that brought Black men into slavery was not alone enough to make the institution bearable to the white conscience.

The Blacks who were brought to this country as slaves were systematically stripped of all cultural ties…Nor were they allowed to develop new institutions to replace the old. They were not permitted to read or write.

White Americans had to become racists or John Browns…There were many more whites of John Brown’s persuasion than is commonly known. The annals of Southern history document the executions of scores of whites accused of fomenting Black revolt.

Today bigotry most often shows itself as blind indifference and willful ignorance rather than as racist activism.

During the time of slavery abolitionists were accused of violence for merely ADVOCATING an end to slavery, while the steady falling of the overseer’s lash went unquestioned as a necessary fact of life.

Blacks were permitted nothing by which to mark themselves as human. They had neither legal nor moral rights. They were property, not people.

Although the Constitution had been amended to declare him a citizen, the Black was neither considered to be, nor treated as, a man.

The larger problem was white society and its institutions. Drawing on Gunnar Myrdal, Rev. Vivian contends that America did not have a “Negro problem” but a “white problem,” requiring change in majority attitudes and institutions.

We were continually warned about “backlash”—which is what white people do when Black people fail to “stay in their place.”

What began as a Negro rights movement and became a civil rights movement would have to become a human rights movement encompassing the entire nation. It would not be enough even for the nation to change its attitudes toward Black people – we saw that the nation would have to change its attitude toward itself as well. White people as individuals and as a group would have to examine and redefine themselves, their past, and their future just as Blacks were doing.

As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his classic study AN AMERICAN DILEMMA, this country does not have a Negro problem, it has a white problem. Changing the white majority, their attitudes and their institutions, is basic to any solution to “racial strife.”

White America has accepted the brutality of enforced poverty, the violence of economic and social discrimination, the viciousness of personal intolerance, as social facts.

Even the Black church, which has been the closest thing in most communities to be a truly independent Black institution, has largely failed to deal with the facts of Black America. The church has taught that Blacks were human. But that they would only enjoy its privileges after death.

John Calhoun voiced the typical slaveholder’s view when he said freedom for whites was impossible without the enslavement of Blacks.

The Black freedom struggle was about dignity, not merely economics. Vivian argues that Black Americans sought “dignity, not dollars; manhood, not money; pride, not prosperity.” The movement was fundamentally a human and moral struggle.

Freedom was conceived of in commercial terms, and indeed there was cause for this..Yet the fact is that when ordinary Black people began to move it was not an economic force that moved them. They sought dignity, not dollars; manhood, not money; pride, not prosperity.

We were continually told by whites and fearful Blacks alike that we were fomenting discord, creating racial strife, mounting reaction and bigotry.

Blacks had to come to see themselves as masters of their own fate, masters of their secular destiny as well as their spiritual destiny.

When white people find filth in the streets of their neighborhood they quite properly call city hall and complain, and it is removed. But when the same whites (and warped Blacks) find filth in the ghetto streets, they call for a clean-up campaign by ghetto residents.

These facts — (of economic discrimination, infant mortality rate, malnutrition) and all the others which describe the Black condition — we knew well. Our problem was to make the rest of the nation understand them.

In 1964, the Small Business Administration reviewed its past ten years and reported that it had made seven loans to Blacks during that time –seven in ten years. This record is typical of most banks, savings and loans companies, and other financial institutions, which provide the capital that allows people to enter the commercial world.

We saw that the failure to admit Blacks to the society had created a permanent ambivalence within the nation, an ambivalence which warped everything that the nation did. Even the simple facts of history had been so twisted that it was impossible for most Americans to understand what happened to their land or why they had arrived at the crisis they were facing.

The first permanent non-Indian settlers in what is now the United States were not whites seeking religious freedom but Blacks seeking physical freedom. These people came here as slaves with an ill-fated Spanish colonial venture. They rebelled and sought refuge with the Indians. The Spanish left and the Blacks remained. This took place more than a hundred years before the landing of the Mayflower.

Of major importance is the fact that at the time of the Revolutionary War the entire American economy was sustained by slavery. Slaves were held in every colony.

For Blacks were not the only ones oppressed by slavery. Whites were also brutalized by their inability to escape from slavery. In the South this was especially clear. A police state was created and the entire population lived in terror of a slave uprising.

Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere threatens everyone: “When there is no justice for ALL, then there is no justice at all.”

During the 1890s, two to three Blacks were lynched every week – week after week, year after year.

In the Dred Scott decision of 1857…the Supreme Court explained that the phrase “the people of the United States” in the Constitution was never meant to include Blacks.

Congress…created the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency designed to make the ex-slaves participants in the national economy. Much good work was done by the Bureau.

Millions of Americans suffered from misplaced hatreds. The classic example is the poor white Southerner who has been pitted against Blacks by the powerful men who exploit them both.

Most of the antislavery agitation in the United States came from poor whites in the South. These people saw that slavery kept THEM in bondage by allowing planters to control all the best land and manipulate the markets to their own advantage.

One reactionary Supreme Court decision interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment as having granted the privilege of national citizenship, but not necessarily state citizenship. This gave Blacks rights such as access to seaports, but left questions of education, suffrage, and employment up to the states.

During the Jim Crow mania, states, counties, towns, and cities vied with one another in passing repressive legislation, running all the way from the silly to the insane. This was the period which the “separate but equal” doctrine was taking shape.

When there is no justice for ALL, then there is no justice at all. Some may be favored, but none are safe.

Legal victories alone were insufficient. Court decisions and legislation mattered, but Rev. Vivian argues they often failed to produce meaningful changes in everyday Black life.

Ironically, it is America’s firm commitment to equalitarian ideals which makes the race question so intense.

In the Fifteenth Amendment, the government officially forbade the denial of voting rights because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And having done this, the government washed its hands of the whole matter.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was intended partly to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, because no more than a tiny fraction of the Black population had ever actually been allowed to vote.

Almost every public pronouncement concerning the condition of Blacks insisted that their situation was rapidly improving. But since Blacks were invisible to the white world, these questionable statements went unverified.

Some of our leaders recommended movement through education…Others to industrial occupations…still other leaders counseled violence. Throughout the history of America we fought many times. Before emancipation there were over 250 slave conspiracies and revolts.

C.T. Vivian embodied action-oriented leadership. Highlights include his work with Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC, and civil rights organizing, leadership development, and youth empowerment.

The Birmingham campaign of 1963 was the first large-scale test of the new method (of nonviolence). It was titled “Project C” – C for CONFRONTATION.

When it became clear that we would not be crushed, official Birmingham accepted our demands—(1) desegregation of all public facilities, (2) hiring and upgrading of workers without discrimination, (3) the release of all jailed demonstrators, (4) the establishment of a permanent biracial committee to keep communications open between Blacks and whites.

Our movement depended on mass support; the mobilization of our people was our principal weapon.

White liberals also touted the success gained through legal action. But important as court battles have been, they failed to make any basic change in the lives of most Blacks.

Ten years after the school desegregation cases of 1954, only 2.14% of the nearly 3 million Black children in Southern schools have been affected and were receiving anything like a desegregated education.

As this protest reached massive proportions it became clear that those Americans who were not coming to realize the justice of the Black demands were closing their minds more permanently and more desperately to justice.

Massive opposition was stirring. White citizens’ councils were forming throughout the South. In the Northern cities, the names were different but the motives were the same whether they came under the heading of parents’ and taxpayers’ groups, homeowners’ associations, or community school councils.

Our accomplishments often bewildered us as much as our defeats.

It was not until the riots began that we understood the extent of our failure. The message from the streets was that hundreds of years of Black appeals for justice would now give way to action.

Civil rights must evolve into human rights. The movement’s ultimate goal was not simply Black advancement but a transformation of the entire nation into a more just society.

Genuine integration can never become a reality until both parties can live together as equals; and that will not happen until each sees the other as human, until each holds the same values upon which the entire culture can grow.

Integration is dead. The concept and the experience, insofar as they were tried, have both failed because of the powerful racism of this society. Blacks, in response, have realized that they must develop their own distinctive culture.

Black organizations that have organized around welfare have almost universally called for the abolishment of that system.

Who then really WANTS the welfare system? Who profits by it? Who perpetuates it? It is, of course, the people who RUN the system.

It is those who ADMINISTER welfare who get the most money, not the recipients; it is the administrators who are most truly ON welfare. This point should always be remembered when they try to speak for the Black community.

The collapse of the integration model has led to many social experiments ranging from Black capitalism to the African revival. There has been a headlong search for new sources of identity.

Within Black communities, therefore, the cry is no longer for integrated education, but for community control. It means Black control of Black schools, just as whites have always controlled their schools.

In a few cases there have even been beginning attempts at coalition between bigots and Blacks in opposition to the white liberals who refuse to give up the rubric of integration.

Some segments of the Black movement are concerning themselves specifically with the creation and re-creation of Black culture. Others have found inspiration in such international movements as socialism.

The only sanity seems to lie in a new form of segregation which will hopefully, in time, bring a new demand for integration – the integration of whites into the re-created culture that the Black minority has begun to achieve.

Most brief, educationally distinct citations come from C.T. Vivian’s Black Power and the American Myth.

From the Lincoln Memorial to the White House: Civil Rights Leaders Press Kennedy for Action After the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: This historic photograph captures the August 28, 1963 meeting between President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leaders in the White House Oval Office immediately following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The photograph (left to right) includes Willard Wirtz (U.S. Secretary of Labor), Floyd McKissick (National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE), Mathew Ahmann (Executive Director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice), Whitney Young (Executive Director of the National Urban League), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC), John Lewis (Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC), Rabbi Joachim Prinz (President of the American Jewish Congress), A. Philip Randolph (Director of the March on Washington and veteran labor leader), President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Reuther (President of the United Automobile Workers, UAW), Roy Wilkins (Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP). Public Domain.

The real historical significance of August 28, 1963, did not end with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech or the March on Washington itself, but continued inside the White House during a 72-minute strategy session between President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leaders. The meeting was not merely ceremonial. It served as a critical discussion about political strategy, legislative priorities, jobs, education, urban poverty, and the future of the civil rights movement, helping shape the path toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Fig. 1. Hundreds of thousands descended on Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963. (U.S. Government Photo.) Public Domain. Sensing a national breakthrough for civil rights, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. joined civil rights leaders to plan a March on Washington for Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The great march filled the VIP section at the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall to past the Washington Monument, a distance of almost one mile. The March on Washington is remembered for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the massive crowd’s hopeful jubilation. The meeting with President John F. Kennedy afterwards was more than a polite courtesy call to the White House–it helped coordinate political strategy for the movement that would have concrete ramifications for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 following Kennedy’s death.

Kennedy’s Reaction to the March

President John F. Kennedy watched the March on Washington, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address, on television from the White House. Though both men were relatively young, King at 34 and Kennedy at 46, they shared a maturity and sensitivity that often contrasted with their public images. King, in particular, was uncomfortable with the intense attention focused on him after his speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

When civil rights leaders arrived at the White House Cabinet Room later that day, Kennedy greeted King with a smile and the words, “I have a dream,” repeating the line that had so impressed him only hours earlier. King brushed aside the compliment and instead asked what the president thought of Walter Reuther’s speech, which had criticized America’s commitment to freedom abroad while failing to fully secure it at home. Kennedy answered dryly, “Oh, I’ve heard Walter plenty of times.”

Fig. 2. Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Leaders of the march posing in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial.) (Photograph by Rowland Scherman, U.S. Information Agency, National Archives and Records Administration.) Public Domain. Civil Rights leaders in this group photograph at the Lincoln Memorial followed up the March on Washington with a visit to the White House to meet President Kennedy. Seated left to right: National Urban League executive director Whitney Young (1921-1971); chairman of the Demonstration Committee Cleveland Robinson (1914-1995); labor union leader A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979); Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Roy Wilkins (1901-1981). Standing left to right: director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Matthew Ahmann (1931-2001); Rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902-1998); Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader John Lewis (1940-2020); Rev. Eugene Carson Blake (1906-1985); Floyd McKissick (1922-1991); labor union leader Walter Reuther (1907-1970).

Fig. 3. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking from the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. (Photograph by Rowland Scherman, U.S. Information Agency, National Archives and Records Administration.) Public Domain. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking at the March on Washington from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Following the successful march for jobs and freedom, civil rights leaders went to the White House to visit with President Kennedy and pushed measures to strengthen the Civil Rights bill.

Civil Rights Priorities

Although King and Kennedy spoke only briefly, the meeting quickly turned to policy. Kennedy and Roy Wilkins talked at length about strengthening the pending civil rights bill in light of the march’s peaceful success. Meanwhile, King moved down the line to stand near John Lewis, the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Civil rights leaders pressed for stronger protections in the civil rights bill, including a ban on racial discrimination in employment. They also warned Kennedy about accelerating automation, which threatened to reduce job opportunities, and described worsening conditions in urban Black communities. Leaders highlighted soaring school dropout rates among Black teenagers and a growing sense of alienation among young African Americans.

A. Philip Randolph told the president that the entire current generation of young Blacks “had no faith” in whites. They also dismissed Black leadership, government and God. To them, he said, American society offered little beyond despair.

The Debate Over Federal Action

The activists also urged Kennedy to restore a provision removed from the 1957 Civil Rights Act that would give the Attorney General broader authority to investigate and pursue civil rights violations.

Kennedy replied that he and Attorney General Robert Kennedy had already examined unemployment and school dropout problems in cities such as Chicago and New York. He argued that community leadership also had a responsibility to encourage educational achievement.

“It seems to me,” Kennedy said, “with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community that we could emphasize educating children, making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.”

Despite the bill’s narrow prospects in Congress, Roy Wilkins countered that the Speaker of the House had assured him an even stronger civil rights bill could pass the House and help pressure the Senate to act. Wilkins urged President Kennedy to go over the heads of congressional opponents and lead a national crusade to win voter approval for the civil rights measures.

Kennedy rejected that strategy. He argued that civil rights had to remain a bipartisan cause and warned that a partisan campaign could undermine Democratic support in the South while allowing Republicans to claim credit for supporting civil rights. He also complained that both parties were engaging in “treacherous” political maneuvering that complicated passage of the legislation. Any add-ons now to the civil rights bill joined existing legislation that was already on the brink of defeat in the Democrat-controlled Senate and too close to call in a Democrat-controlled House.

In the tension between moral urgency and political pragmatism, civil rights leaders pressed Kennedy to act more boldly, while Kennedy focused on the difficult realities of congressional politics and bipartisan support.

White House, August 28, 1963, meeting with President Kennedy after the march.

Reuther Challenges the President

The sharpest exchange came from Walter Reuther.

“You can’t escape this problem,” the labor leader warned. “There are two ways of resolving it, either by reason or riots.”

Reuther argued that racial conflict would not be confined to historic battlefields like Gettysburg but would erupt in neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities across the country. He also criticized Kennedy’s governing style, calling it a “seminar” approach in which meetings produced too little action. Reuther contrasted Kennedy with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose governing style as Majority Leader he praised where he relentlessly pushed difficult legislation through Congress. by “jawbone[ing]” an issue until he got “difficult things done.”

Throughout much of the debate, King remained silent. When he finally spoke, he suggested that if Kennedy led a civil rights crusade, perhaps former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower could join it, transforming the effort into the bipartisan movement Kennedy desired.

Kennedy immediately dismissed the idea.

“No, it won’t,” he replied.

King answered with a playful jab: “Doesn’t President Eisenhower happen to be in the other denomination?”

Rev. Eugene Blake and the Eisenhower Idea

King’s remark referred to Rev. Eugene Blake, Eisenhower’s pastor, who was present in the Cabinet Room. Blake had been the only white speaker at the March on Washington. He had previously been arrested during a civil rights demonstration in Baltimore and had spent time in jail for the cause.

Earlier that day Blake had declared from the march platform, “We come late, late we come, in the reconciling and repentant spirit.” The Protestant clergyman supported both civil rights and economic justice for African Americans while avoiding the more revolutionary language favored by some activists.

Blake told Kennedy that Eisenhower might indeed be willing to help. The president seized on the suggestion and encouraged Blake to visit the former president in Gettysburg to explore what role he might play in advancing the civil rights bill.

“And include a Catholic and maybe a businessman or two,” Kennedy advised.

Then, pointing toward Reuther, he added with a grin, “And leave Walter in the background.”

The room chuckled. Shortly afterward, before leaving the meeting, Kennedy assured the group he would remain in contact in the months ahead as the civil rights bill moved forward.

SOURCES:

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

Fig. 4. Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Aerial view of Washington Monument showing marchers.) (U.S. Information Agency photograph, National Archives and Records Administration.) Public Domain. On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 peaceful protesters descended on Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history.

Harry Belafonte and Hollywood at the March on Washington

A Life of Achievement and Activism

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) was born in New York City and died there at the age of 96. Over a remarkable career that spanned more than seventy years, he earned a Tony Award, an Emmy Award, and three Grammy Awards as both a pioneering singer and accomplished film actor. Beyond his entertainment career, Belafonte devoted himself to the struggle for civil rights and became one of the movement’s most visible and influential supporters.

Bringing Hollywood to History

Belafonte used his celebrity and influence to help unite the entertainment industry behind the civil rights cause. As plans were finalized for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, he organized support from many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. To ensure a strong show of solidarity, Belafonte chartered a plane from Los Angeles to bring a group of prominent actors, entertainers, and artists to Washington, D.C.

Their presence highlighted the growing national support for the movement and demonstrated that the fight for equality extended well beyond political and civil rights circles into the highest levels of American popular culture.

The March on Washington

An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital for what became one of the most significant events in American history. The crowd filled the area around the Lincoln Memorial and stretched across the National Mall toward the Washington Monument, covering nearly a mile. Despite the enormous size of the gathering, the atmosphere was one of hope, optimism, and celebration.

It was from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech, a defining moment of the civil rights movement and one of the most celebrated speeches in American history.

Hollywood Stars in Attendance

Among the many entertainers who joined Belafonte at the march were Marlon Brando, Rita Moreno, James Garner, Tony Franciosa, Sammy Davis Jr., Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, Susan Strasberg, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston, and numerous others.

Many of these performers actively supported civil rights causes, while others used their public stature to bring national attention to the movement’s goals. Their participation underscored the broad coalition that had gathered in Washington to advocate for racial equality, voting rights, employment opportunities, and social justice.

Meeting with President Kennedy

Following the march, Dr. King and several prominent civil rights leaders traveled to the White House to meet with President John F. Kennedy. During their discussions, they reviewed the significance of the day’s events, examined the challenges still facing African Americans, and discussed the future direction of the civil rights movement.

The meeting also touched on the legislative efforts that would eventually culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although President Kennedy would not live to see its passage, the momentum generated by the March on Washington helped build public support for the landmark legislation that became law under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

A Lasting Legacy

Harry Belafonte’s role in the March on Washington reflected his belief that artists had a responsibility to use their influence in the service of justice. By bringing some of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces to the nation’s capital, he helped amplify the message of the civil rights movement and demonstrated the power of cultural figures to support social change. His contributions as both an entertainer and activist remain an enduring part of American history.

REMARKS BY HARRY BELAFONTE:
“We are here to bear witness to what we know. We know that this country, America, to which we are committed, and which we love, aspires to become that country in which all men are free. We also know that freedom is not license. Everyone in a democracy ought to be free to vote. But no one has the license to oppress or demoralize another. We also know or we would not be here, that the American negro has endured for many generations in this country which he helped to build the most intolerable injustices. To be a negro in this country means several unpleasant things. In the Deep South it often means he is prevented from exercising his right to vote by all manner of intimidation up to and including death. This fact of intimidation is a great weight in the life of any negro and though it varies in degree it never varies in intent which is simply to limit, to demoralize and to keep in subservient status more than 20 million negro people. We are here, therefore, to protest this evil and make known our resolve to do everything we can possibly do to bring it to an end. As artists and as human beings we rejoice in the knowledge that human experience has no color and that excellence in any endeavor is the fruit of individual labor and love. We believe artists have a valuable function in any society since it is the artists who reveal society to itself. But any society that ceases to respect the human aspirations of all its citizens courts political chaos and artistic sterility. We need the energies of these people to whom we have for so long denied full humanity. We need their vigor, their joy, the authority which their pain has brought them and cutting ourselves off from them then we are punishing and diminishing ourselves. As long as we do so our society is in great danger. Our growth as artists is severely menaced and no American can boast of freedom since he cannot be considered an example of it. We are here then in an attempt to strike the chains of the ex-master no less than the ex-slave and to invest with reality that deep and universal longing which has sometimes been called the American Dream.”

Fig. 5. Leaders of the march leading marchers down the street. (U.S. Information Agency photograph, National Archives and Records Administration.) Public Domain.

Never Sell the Bones of Your Father and Mother: Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé Fight for the Wallowa Homeland.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: Portrait of Chief Joseph in native dress with ornaments, 1900, by Lee Moorhouse (1850–1926). Public Domain.

Chief Joseph became the moral voice of the Nez Percé struggle against dispossession, forced removal, and broken treaties, using dignity, reason, and appeals to justice even as his people lost their homeland. His life story and quotations reveal not simply a military defeat in the Nez Percé War, but a powerful indictment of how the United States acquired Native lands and treated Native peoples.

INTRODUCTION.
by John P. Walsh

Chief Joseph, 1877. Chief Joseph inherited his father’s determination never to sell the Wallowa homeland.

Chief Joseph and the Wallowa Valley

Joseph (1840-1904) was the leader of one of the Nez Percé tribes. The band amounted to about 200 people who lived in the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon. White settlers wanted their grazing lands. After the death of Wellamotkin in 1871, a Nez Percé chief and Joseph’s father, the 31-year-old tall and handsome Joseph began to have conflict with the whites.

The Nez Percé Before White Contact

At the time of Joseph’s birth in 1840 there were around 6,000 Nez Percé, most of them living in small fishing villages next to fecund streams and rivers. Each village had its own “chief” and young Joseph visited these villages with his father where he learned about the people and the lore of his nation.

Once each winter was over, the Nez Percé, like other Native American tribes ranged beyond their own territory. These could be friendly visits like buffalo hunts or more contentious meetings. These cultural interchanges influenced Nez Percé as they influenced others. For hundreds of years the Nez Percé were mostly influenced by the Pacific Coast culture through the Chinook tribes more than the Plains tribes.

Horses and the Transformation of Nez Percé Culture

In the 1730s the Nez Percé learned about horses from Native Americans like the Apache who had contact with Spanish settlements in the south. With horses the Nez Percé traveled farther and more often into the Plains so that by the 1800s the Nez Percé were more a Plains tribe though they maintained their roots in the Pacific Northwest.

First Encounters With Europeans

It was at the start of the 19^th century that those venturing Nez Percé came into contact with whites and bought guns. The home tribe didn’t have to wait long to encounter the whites – in 1805 Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River. Promised more guns, none appeared for a couple of years and these by way of a Canadian trader.

The Nez Percé got their name from this French-Canadian trader who saw the nose piercings that the tribe used to affix ornaments to themselves. In 1812 the American traders that Lewis and Clark promised finally arrived but quickly left and the Canadians took over.

Missionaries, Christianity, and Growing Divisions

By the late 1820s the Nez Percé roamed farther east and encountered more white fur traders among whom they lived, traded, fought, and frequently intermarried. It was in this period that the first Christian missions, both protestant and Catholic, began their influence among the Nez Percé. In the 1830s the Nez Percé journeyed to St. Louis to recruit missionaries which was successful. Joseph’s father, Wellamotkin, became a Presbyterian and Joseph was baptized at birth. By 1850, with the influx of white settlers into Oregon, the Native Americans expelled the missionaries though this divided the tribe. Joseph retreated to the Wallowa Valley away from contact – and conflict – with the new arrivals.

Treaties, Gold, and Broken Promises

In 1855 the Nez Percé signed a treaty that created a large reservation for themselves. Joseph was considered a Christian and friendly to the whites. In 1860 when gold was discovered on the Nez Percé reservation the rampant trespassing of whites was unacceptable to Joseph. White crime against Nez Percé went up and whites built settlements on Indian land. Federal agents arrived and offered a smaller new reservation to the Nez Percé. The proposal was initially opposed by Indian leaders but Federal agents bought off the local chiefs one-by-one and, in 1863, a treaty was signed.

The new reservation was one quarter the size of what it was and did not include the Wallowa Valley. Joseph and most of the rest of the chiefs refused to sign. It was at this time that Joseph renounced his protestant Christianity as the white man’s religion. The Nez Percé on the new reservation saw the arrival of more and more whites. Though the Wallowa Valley where Joseph lived remained outside the white settlements’ orbit that changed over a short time.

Chief Joseph Takes Leadership

In 1871, after Joseph buried his father and became chief, white settlers began moving into the Wallowa Valley. Joseph protested to the U.S. Government and, in 1873, President U.S. Grant ordered the whites to withdraw and formally recognized the Wallowa reservation.

But the White House in Washington D.C. was far away and the whites refused to leave. They threatened Joseph with extermination if the Nez Percé didn’t leave – and invited increasing numbers of white settlers who poured into the valley. The Oregon governor took the side of the white settlers and President Grant was forced to rescind his decision that favored Chief Joseph.

Mounting Tensions and Federal Intervention

Chief Joseph – known as Heinmot Tooyalakekt (“thunder travels to lofty mountains”) – counseled delay. He moved his tribe farther from the encroaching white settlers and appealed to the U.S. Government again whose review of land claims and treaties advised siding with the Indians.

The U.S. Government did nothing until they appointed a panel in November 1876 with the power to make a final decision about the competing claims. Looking to dominate and persuade Chief Joseph, they were not able to do so by argument.

Chief Joseph, before 1877. Photographed by William H. Jackson. Joseph consistently preferred negotiation and diplomacy over war, even as violence escalated.

But events on the ground were intensifying between whites and Nez Percé so much so that violence between them was expected. The commissioners made their decision. Whether Nez Percé signed the 1863 or not all Nez Percé must go to the new small reservation or be taken there by force. The whites would get the Wallowa Valley. The deadline was April 1,1877.

The Deadline and the Outbreak of War

As the deadline approached the Nez Percé appealed to the commission to let them continue to live in the Wallowa Valley but the decision was final. A new deadline of June 12, 1877 was set. Joseph was called a coward by his tribe for abiding by the order to go to the reservation.

That night a Nez Percé youth avenged the murder of his father by whites by killing 4 whites and wounding 1 more. Nez Percé killed 15 more whites in the next couple of days – and struck terror in the hearts of white settlers.

Chief Joseph counseled diplomacy but most of the Nez Percé didn’t listen to him and left for hiding places. Joseph was watched closely by his own tribe that he would not abandon them or betray them to the soldiers. Chief Joseph and his buffalo-hunting younger brother Ollokot finally decided to join the Nez Percé to fight the whites.

Early Nez Percé Victories

Soldiers were deployed to force the Nez Percé onto the reservation. With Nez Percé informants they planned to attack the hostile Nez Percé in their encampment. The Indian response was to buy time to escape. A white flag of truce went on ahead of the small Nez Percé party to meet the soldiers. There was an exchange of gunfire and the battle was on. The soldiers lost 34 dead, a third of the command, while the Nez Percé lost none and two wounded. The victors retrieved scores of guns and ammo that the fleeing soldiers left behind.

Reinforcements were called in – on both sides. Rumors ran wild. There was a massacre of reservation Nez Percé mistaken for hostiles. As the soldiers advanced the hostiles cut in behind them and the white settlers the soldiers were supposed to be protecting lay exposed to the hostiles. These Nez Percé advanced and massacred parties of soldiers, civilian volunteers, and terrified settlers.

Nez Percé picked up about 40 warriors but also whole communities of women and children to protect. Joseph was being given credit for this successful war campaign though it was other war leaders who led the strategy and tactics.

The Fighting Retreat

By July 11, 1877, there was 400 soldiers and 180 others who were pursuing the Nez Percé. They attacked and the Nez Percé responded. The battle went on for two days though the Nez Percé were outnumbered 6 to 1. The army lost 13 killed and 27 wounded and the Nez Percé lost 4 killed and 6 wounded – and escaped again. The Nez Percé decided it was time to evacuate the area.

On July 16, 1877 Chief Joseph agreed to the exodus to Montana. The army decided to pursue them. Army reinforcements were called out of Montana to intercept the Nez Percé. Chief Joseph decided to talk with them. Promising to be peaceful and pay for any supplies on his way to the Crows, he reassured the volunteers. In Montana. the Nez Percé rested though they were being pursued by new reinforcements. On August 8, 1877, the Nez Percé were attacked. The Nez Percé were surprised but reorganized and counter attacked and escaped with much of the army’s hardware and ammo. The army lost 33 soldiers dead and 38 wounded. Fourteen of 17 officers were among the casualties. But at least 60 Nez Percé were killed in the battle of Big Hole.

The Flight Toward Canada

The Nez Percé decided to escape to Canada. Lean Elk replaced Looking Glass as supreme war chief. On and on the Indians hurried. On September 13, 1877 the Nez Percé were overtaken by U.S. cavalry. But, at Canyon Creek, the Nez Percé escaped with three wounded while 3 cavalrymen were killed and 11 were wounded.

Nez Percé, c. 1910. The Nez Percé conducted one of the most remarkable fighting retreats in American history before being cornered near the Canadian border.

Just 30 miles from the Canada border and confident that they had outrun their pursuers, the Nez Percé took a much-needed rest. This pause became their last stand.

The Final Siege and Surrender

The army arrived with 600 men that included infantry, cavalry, and Cheyenne warriors. This force intercepted the Nez Percé on September 30, 1877. They attacked and, from Nez Percé gunfire, the army had 2 officers and 22 soldiers killed and 4 officers and 38 soldiers wounded. Another contingent of army successfully worked to cut the Nez Percé camp into pieces. A siege ensued. The army commander lured Joseph to a diplomatic talk and then took him prisoner/hostage. The Nez Percé retaliated by taking an army officer prisoner/hostage. A swap was quickly agreed to.

The arrival of army reinforcements on October 4, 1877 spelled the end for the Nez Percé hold outs. Negotiations began and the Nez Percé were split – some argued to keep fighting. Joseph agreed to surrender. When the parlay ended one of chiefs who argued to keep fighting was shot in the head by a stray bullet as he stood up from discussion with the white man.

Bibliography: The Patriot Chiefs, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Viking Press, NY, 1961, pp. 312-340.
Saga of Chief Joseph, Helen Addison Howard, 1978.

Following the Battle of Bear Paw, non-treaty (of 1863) groups of the Nez Percé surrendered to the United States Army on October 5, 1877, ending the Nez Percé War. Even after surrender, Joseph remained committed to peaceful advocacy for Native rights. His famous surrender speech expresses grief for his people rather than personal defeat, making him an enduring symbol of Native resistance and moral leadership.

When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold the country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words, this country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother. Wellamotkin to Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, 1871.

Somebody has got our horses. Reaction to violation of surrender treaty terms by U.S. Government. “When the terms of surrender were violated by the government, [Chief] Joseph did not dig up the tomahawk and go on the warpath again…. He…. spoke with a straight tongue , and was a gentleman of his word. Nor did he blame [Maj. Gen. O. O.] Howard or [Col. Nelson A.] Miles for what his people suffered. He remarked only the above. (Quoted in Saga of Chief Joseph, H. A. Howard, University of Nebraska Press, 1978, p. 348.)

We love the land. It is our home. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, November 1876.

Suppose a white man goes to my neighbor and says to him, ‘Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.’ My neighbor answers, ‘Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.’ The white man returns to me and says, ‘Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them.’ If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they were bought. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, November 1876.

Gravesite of Chief Joseph, Nez Percé Cemetery, Nespelem, Washington — 1993 Chief Joseph’s grave lies in the tribal cemetery at Nespelem, where he spent the final decades of his life after years of forced displacement. In October 1877, with his band exhausted and cornered in northern Montana—just 40 miles from Canada—Joseph surrendered under the belief that his people would be allowed to return to their Idaho homeland. Instead, they were shuttled among forts and reservations across the southern Plains before being relocated to the Colville Reservation in east‑central Washington. Joseph died there in 1904, far from the Wallowa Valley he had fought to preserve. Author’s photograph.

If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect him to grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth, and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented, nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, North American Review, Cedar Falls, Iowa, April 1879.

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed…The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men are dead. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, 1877.

It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food, no one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, 1877.

I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, 1877.

Chief Joseph, c. 1903.

Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. Chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), Nez Percé, 1877.

Gravesite of Chief Joseph and war followers, Nez Percé Cemetery, Nespelem, Washington — 1993. Colville Indian Reservation, Okanogan Co., Washington. Chief Joseph’s gravesite is in the distance marked by the tall memorial pillar. Author’s photograph.

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (b. 1942). American businessman and politician.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “File:Mayor Michael Bloomberg (cropped).jpg” by Rubenstein is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Michael Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, politician, and author. He is the CEO and majority owner of Bloomberg L.P, which he co-founded.

Bloomberg was the mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013. His tenure was marked by a period of relative prosperity but also controversial city-wide policies and practices, such as “stop and frisk.”

By having the city’s mayoral term limits law extended in 2008, Bloomberg served three consecutive four-year terms as mayor.

In 2020 Michael Bloomberg entered the Democratic Party primaries as a presidential candidate.

According to Forbes business magazine, Bloomberg is worth about $64 billion. He is divorced and has two grown daughters.

My favorite childhood book was called Johnny Tremain, about a Boston boy who joins the Sons of Liberty at the dawn of the American Revolution. At the end of the book, Johnny stands on Lexington Commons and sees a nation that is “green with spring dreaming of the future”. That’s the America I know and love. Michael Bloomberg, 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, August 20, 2020.

Growing up, I was taught to believe that America is the greatest country in the world. Not because we won the Second World War, but because of why we fought it; for freedom, democracy and equality. Michael Bloomberg, 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, August 20, 2020.

I’ve supported Democrats, Republicans and independents. Hell, I’ve actually been a Democrat, Republican, and independent. Michael Bloomberg, 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, August 20, 2020.

I believe we need a leader who is ready to be Commander in Chief, not college debater in chief. Michael Bloomberg, Super Tuesday speech, March 3, 2020.

I follow facts, respect data, and tell the truth. My whole career I have been a doer. And I believe we need less talk, less partisanship, less division, less tweeting. Michael Bloomberg, Super Tuesday speech, March 3, 2020.

Let me also say, since I have the floor for a second, that I really am surprised that all of these, my fellow contestants up here, I guess would be the right word for it, given nobody pays attention to the clock, I’m surprised they show up, because I would have thought after I did such a good job in beating them last week, that they’d be a little bit afraid to do that. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Well, I think what’s right for New York City isn’t necessarily right for all the other cities, otherwise you would have a naked cowboy in every city. So let’s get serious here. But I do think it’s the government’s job to have good science, and to explain to people what science says, or how to take care of themselves and extend their lives. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

We shouldn’t be fighting wars that we can’t win. We should go to war only as a last resort. Nobody argues with that. But this is a dangerous world, and if we haven’t learned that after 9/11, I don’t know what’s going to teach us what to do. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

We have to be able to stop terrorism. And there’s no guarantees that you’re going to be able to do it, but we have to have some troops in places where terrorists congregate, and to not do so is just irresponsible. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

You can’t move the embassy back. We should not have done it without getting something from the Israeli government, but it was done, and you’re going to have to leave it there. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Only solution here is a two-state solution. The Palestinians have to be accommodated. The real problem here is you have two groups of people, both of whom think God gave them the same piece of land. And the answer is to obviously split it up. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Misconception? That I’m six feet tall. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

This election is just too important, and we cannot afford to get it wrong. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Vladimir Putin thinks Donald Trump should be president of the United States. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I’ve apologized and asked for forgiveness. I’ve met with black leaders to try to get an understanding of how I can better position myself and what I should have done and what I should do next time. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Let me tell you, I have been working very hard. We’ve improved the school system for Black and Brown students in New York City. We’ve increased the jobs that are available to them. We’ve increased the housing that’s available to them. We have programs– Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

But if you talk to the people in New York City, I have over 100 Black elected officials that have endorsed me. A lot of them are in the audience tonight. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I was the mayor of the largest, most populous city in the United States for 12 years, and people will tell you it’s a lot better city today. It is safer for everybody. The school system is better. The budget is under control. We’ve done the things that people need in New York City for all ethnicities. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I know that if I were Black, my success would have been a lot harder to achieve. And I know a lot of Black people that if they were white it would have been a lot easier for them. That’s just a fact, and we’ve got to do something about it than rather just demagogue about it. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I have been training for this job since I stepped on the pile that was still smoldering on 9/11. I know what to do. I’ve shown I know how to run a country. I’ve run the city which is almost the same size, is bigger, than most countries in the world. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I’m the one choice that makes some sense. I have the experience. I have the resources. And I have the record. When people hired me to run New York City three times, in an overwhelmingly Democratic, progressive city, they elected me again and again. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Let’s just go on the record. They talk about 40 Democrats. 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president–I—I got them. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

If you keep on going, we will elect Bernie. Bernie will lose to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump and the House and the Senate and some of the statehouses will all go red. And then between gerrymandering and appointing judges, for the next 20 or 30 years, we’re going to live with this catastrophe. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

The polls aren’t the election. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

Can anybody in the room imagine moderate Republicans going over and voting for him? And you have to do that, or you can’t win. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

We have put background checks — we have got background checks in 20 states. So you can do it. It’s Congress that can’t seem to do it. And I don’t know why we think they’re going to do it. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I saw a statistic the other day, when I came into office, zero New York City schools were in the top 25 of the state. When I left, 23 out of 25 were from New York City. We’ve cut the gap between the rich and the poor. We’ve made an enormous difference in all of the options that parents have. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I raised teacher salaries by 43 percent. I put an extra $5 billion into our school system. I value education. It is the only way to solve the poverty problem is to get people a good education. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I think the Chinese government has not been open. Their press — the freedom of press does not exist there. They — their human rights record is abominable, and we should make a fuss, which we have been doing, I suppose. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

We have to deal with China if we’re ever going to solve the climate crisis. We have to deal with them because our economies are inextricably linked. We would not be able to sell or buy the products that we need. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

In terms of whether he’s a dictator, he does serve at the behest of the Politboro, their group of people. But there’s no question he has an enormous amount of power. But he does play to his constituency. You can negotiate with him. That’s exactly what we have to do, make it seem that it’s in his interest and in his people’s interest to do what we want to do. Follow the rules, particularly no stealing of intellectual property, Follow the rules in terms of the trade agreements that we have are reciprocal and go equally in both directions. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020.

I do agree with her that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. We should raise taxes on the rich. I did that as mayor in New York City. I raised taxes. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

What a wonderful country we have. The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss here? Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

I can’t speak for all billionaires. All I know is I’ve been very lucky, made a lot of money, and I’m giving it all away to make this country better. And a good chunk of it goes to the Democratic Party, as well. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

What am I, chicken liver? Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

I can’t think of a ways that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get re-elected than listening to this conversation. It’s ridiculous. We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

I don’t think there’s any chance of the senator beating President Trump. You don’t start out by saying I’ve got 160 million people I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love. That’s just not a way that you go and start building the coalition that the Sanders camp thinks that they can do. I don’t think there’s any chance whatsoever. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

Look, this is a management job, and Donald Trump’s not a manager. This is a job where you have to build teams. He doesn’t have a team so he goes and makes decisions without knowing what’s going on or the implications of what he does. We cannot run the railroad this way. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

This country has to pull together and understand that the people that we elect — and it’s not just the president of the United States — they should have experience, they should have credentials, they should understand what they’re doing and the implications thereof. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

Fortunately, I make a lot of money, and we do business all around the world. And we are preparing it. The number of pages will probably be in the thousands of pages. I can’t go to TurboTax. Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Presidential debate, February 19, 2020.

This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of their rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Politics of Inclusion: ROBERT F. KENNEDY, 50 years Later (1968-2018).

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: “‘Some men see things as they are, and say ‘Why?’ — I dream of things that never were, and say, ‘Why not?”” by gwilmore is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

PHOTO CREDIT: “No Known Restrictions: Robert Kennedy Speaks to Civil Rights Demonstrators at Justice Department by Warren K. Leffler, 1963 (LOC)” by pingnews.com is marked with CC PDM 1.0.

By John P. Walsh

It was fifty years ago today (June 8, 1968) that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had his funeral in Manhattan and a train procession to Washington D.C., for his burial. This after being shot on June 5, 1968 upon winning the California Democratic primary for president of the United States. His assassination, funeral, and the long train ride to Arlington National Cemetery are seared into the national memory as well as my own who heard and watched on radio and television all these historic events unfold as a child. It is a memorable series of life-changing happenings for the nation, similar to when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and his long funeral train procession from Washington, D.C. to Illinois took place in 1865. Before Lincoln’s funeral train went on to its final destination of Springfield, Illinois, the president’s body lay in state in Chicago. There, as it experienced in its other stops across several states, throngs greeted the Civil War president and, as History would have it, my great-grandfather who was in the Union army at that time served as one of Lincoln’s honor guards.

RFK Mississippi Delta April 1967 — Robert F. Kennedy campaigns in 1968.

On June 8, 1968, brides and bridesmaids tossed their wedding bouquets at RFK’s funeral train when it passed in order to make their final good-byes. Though weddings and funerals are very different, they have similarities for being one of humanity’s great milestones, a significant rite of passage, where what was or has been, has died and what lies ahead is mysterious.

History records that one of RFK’s favorite songs was Where have all the flowers gone?, the modern folk song written by Pete Seeger which became a big hit, a number one musical sensation, in 1962, when RFK was Attorney General of the United States. The song is its own meditation on life’s transience – with its carriage of universal mortality – and whose lyrics, which Bobby Kennedy’s intuition understood perhaps more than he knew – grew more and more prophetic as the 1960’s moved forward.

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago…

kennedy campiagn itinerary — RFK’s campaign schedule for president from June 7 to June 17, 1968. John F. Kennedy Library.

In the JFK Library in Boston, there’s a multi-page document which is RFK’s campaign schedule for president from June 7 to June 17, 1968. In the last 10 weeks the candidate had won four out of five state primaries he entered – in the Midwest (Indiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota) and California. Typed and single-spaced for over 11 pages, it became immediately moribund with his unexpected and premature rendezvous with death.

Ted Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy at Bobby Kennedy's funeral — Robert Kennedy’s funeral. His widow, Ethel, and younger brother, Ted who delivered the oration, June 8, 1968, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City.

On June 7, 1968, Senator Kennedy of New York was not to be lying in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan but on a 6 a.m. flight from L.A. to St. Louis for a luncheon with convention delegates. He then was to fly to New York State for a flurry of campaign appearances starting at Niagara Falls which would literally take him working into the early hours of the next day. On June 8, 1968, RFK was not to be funeralized with a train procession to follow for burial at Arlington, but making campaign appearances all over New York State from dawn to dusk. On June 9 he was not to lay silent on a hill below Custis House, not far from his brother, the slain 35th President of the United States, but…

Perhaps RFK’s legacy for Democrats in 2018 and beyond is not that, as many insist, the New Deal Democratic coalition died along those rails on June 8, 1968 – fifty years ago today – but that it continues inherently with every progress and advancement made in society and, importantly, from and for all sides of American life. RFK’s brand of American politics for the Democratic Party is one that looks to include more of a wide array of political viewpoints than one would easily imagine possible or manageable. On June 8, 1968, Cecil Smith, of Charleston, South Carolina, was quoted in The Washington Evening Star as calling Kennedy “a wonderful man — a man of everybody.” Kennedy would never stop trying to govern from a grassroots political perspective which is creative and critical of extremes or mere pragmatism on behalf of the noble pursuit to be elected to high office so to effectively lead a diverse and great nation into a better future for all.

In today’s moribund politics of division, RFK’s ideals for America were no less difficult to achieve in 1968 than in 2018 – or beyond. After RFK was killed, an already-polarized presidential election of 1968 led to a predominance over the next fifty years of a strong brand of partisan politics. Kennedy’s more inclusive approach turned up historically truncated and, with decades of often mean-spirited political partisanship, is even chafed at as exotic or, at least, futile. Yet that Kennedy brand of democratic politics would never accept such defeatism then or now.

RFK’s at the podium to deliver a victory speech following the outcome of the California primary. These last words of 42-year-old Senator Kennedy to the American people, given shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, and literally moments before he was shot, speaks volumes to his governing approach for the future. Its vision absolutely requires the many and diverse hands, voices, and votes of the American people to accomplish, which was true in 1968 and today.

“What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis. What has been going on in the United States for the last three years – the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society – the division, whether it’s between blacks and whites, the poor and the more affluent, or between different age groups or the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together, that we are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running over the next few months… The country wants to move in a different direction. We want to deal with our own problems in our own country and we want peace in Vietnam…The fact is all of us are involved in this great effort – and it’s a great effort not on behalf of the Democratic Party – it’s a great effort on behalf of the United States – on behalf of our own people- on behalf of mankind all around the globe and the next generation of Americans… What we are going to do in the rural areas of our country? What we are going to do for those who still suffer in the United States from hunger? What we are going to do around the rest of the globe? And whether we are going to continue the policies that have been so unsuccessful, in Vietnam of American troops and American marines carrying the major burden of that conflict I do not want to and I think we should move in a different direction. So I thank all of you who made this possible this evening, all of the effort that you have made, and all of the people whose names I haven’t mentioned but did all of the work…So I thank all of you…And now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there…”

Visitors at RFK’s gravesite, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, June 2001. Author’s photograph.

The Kennedy Model: Avoiding War in an Age of Nuclear Threats.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: Hawker-Siddeley Blue Steel was started privately in 1954. A contract was placed in 1956 for a stand-off missile to carry a thermonuclear device with a 1 megaton yield by the British Ministry of Supply. Blue Steel was powered by two Armstrong Siddeley Motors that were ignited on launch and enabled the missile to fly at supersonic speed. The missile was constructed of stainless steel with surfaces manufactured of titanium steel. Blue Steel first entered service in 1962 and remained as Britain’s nuclear deterrent until 1970. see- https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/collections/hawker-siddeley-blue-steel/ PHOTO: “Hawker Siddeley Blue Steel” by hugh llewelyn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

While the North Korea nuclear confrontation of 2017 differed significantly from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the successful lesson from John F. Kennedy’s leadership was the necessity of restraint, patience, diplomacy, and moral responsibility in avoiding catastrophic war. President Trump should emulate Kennedy’s ability to combine military strength with a commitment to peaceful resolution rather than provoke or initiate conflict.

By John P. Walsh, August 9, 2017

In addition to Twitter, the media tells us that U.S. President Donald J. Trump loves to watch a lot of TV. Has he seen the film: Virtual JFK (2008)?

“Does it matter,” the film’s narrator states, “who is president on issues of war and peace? Can a president make a decisive difference in matters of war and peace? Can a president decisively lead his country into war or keep his country out of war? Or are the forces that drive nations into conflict far more impersonal (and) out of the control of any human being, even a president?”

Nuclear crises remain among the greatest dangers facing humanity because several nations possess nuclear weapons, including North Korea.

Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy. Similar to JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Trump in 2017 must use the military and moral strength of the U.S. to seek and find a conclusion so that North Korea changes course on their nuclear weapons peacefully. Fair use.

Nine nations stockpile around 16,300 nuclear weapons. The U.S. possesses less than half of them.

In 2014 nine nations around the world—including North Korea—have around 16,300 nuclear weapons. Estimates are that North Korea’s arsenal today may be about 20 warheads or higher. In descending order of warhead amounts, the other nuclear states are Russia (8,000 warheads), the U.S.A. (7,300), France (300), China (250), the UK (225), India and Pakistan (about 100 each) and Israel (80).

According to the National Security Archive, the last tactical nuclear weapons left Cuba in December 1962. For a rogue state such as North Korea to possess nuclear weapons is dangerous and unpredictable to the region and world.

Kennedy prepared for war but consistently avoided taking actions that would trigger either conventional or nuclear conflict.

Like JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. must use its military and moral strength to seek and find a conclusion so that North Korea changes course on their nuclear weapons peacefully. Exactly what that change should look like is an important debate not explored here, but the U.S. must not or never start or provoke a nuclear war to achieve it.

Kennedy prepared for nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but always carefully stayed away from pulling the trigger. There can be no close analogy between Cuba, 90 miles off American shores, in 1962 and North Korea, over 6,000 miles away, in 2017.

The Cold War by the early 1960’s had become a well-worn competitive geopolitical game that hadn’t completely played itself out. The Russians built a wall in Berlin in 1961; Kennedy quarantined Cuba in 1962. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the missiles were clearly Russian nukes. In 2017 what sources can Trump hold accountable for the North Korean weapons deployment in addition to the rogue regime? China? Russia? Iran? If Pyongyang is as remote and obscure today as the Kremlin was in Kennedy’s time, today’s political and military equations appear to be more tangled and complicated.

Kennedy’s example demonstrates that strength can be expressed through successful conflict avoidance, not merely through military action.

JFK: “It will be worse before it gets better.”

Any calculations for war must include those who may or will get killed – and how many. Is American “hyper” power any good if its allies are casualties on a massive scale? No nuclear exchange must result with a hermit kingdom dictator who is not a friend of the U.S. or its allies in the region – especially if war may incalculably spread.

If the U.S. has allies in the true meaning of the word then an attack on them by North Korea (or China or Russia) is equal to an attack on the homeland – otherwise what’s the point of the U.S. having allies at all? The U.S. must protect its allies in the region to the highest degree so to defend and preserve its esteemed alliances. In this ongoing dangerous politico-military standoff there are ramifications with severe strong risk for the U.S. as a global superpower and markedly in East Asia. North Korea must somehow stand down for there to be success from the perspective of the U.S and its allies.

Effective leadership in a nuclear crisis depends on cool-headed judgment, patience, and a careful balance of “carrot and stick” diplomacy.

Similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis that endured for 13 straight days—the Korean crisis has gone on arguably for over 60 years — patience and cool-headed leadership joined to a calibration of carrot and stick (preferring the carrot) should serve as worthwhile qualities so to craft a necessarily peaceful and successful outcome.

“Because of the ingenuity of science and man’s own inability to control his relations one with another,” said JFK in 1961 in Virtual JFK, “we happen to live in the most dangerous time in the history of the human race.” The film states that experienced military advisers believed that whenever Americans committed military force – they won the conflict.

Kennedy avoided war –and was almost impeached for it.

But as frequent and strong pressure by many advisers is put on Kennedy to commit the U.S. to a war, the president time and again chose to avoid both conventional and nuclear war.

It may not be well remembered today but after the failure of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was talk of John Kennedy’s impeachment for incompetence. Many in his own Democratic party wouldn’t support him because they had convinced themselves he wasn’t a serious political leader.

JFK: “The United States as the world knows will never start a war.”

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions presented a challenge requiring both deterrence and diplomacy rather than reckless escalation. The United States has an obligation to protect its allies while preventing a wider regional or global catastrophe.

In 2017 the defeat of 33-year-old Kim Jong-un’s nuclear threat short of war will not be simply a victory for the status quo but a step forward in terms of American leadership in that part of the world.

An actual war –even if nonnuclear and limited which is improbable -– cannot be in any civilized people’s self-interest. Certainly if Kim started a nuclear war, which is very remote but possible, war would come. As Trump stated plainly, on August 8, 2017, the U.S. response would be with “fire and fury.”

In October 1962 Kennedy’s speech to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis included his own “fiery” rhetoric:

“Third: It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

JFK concluded with the overall purpose of his actions: “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right – not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.”

Trump should aspire to Kennedy’s commitment to peace and responsible statesmanship in the nuclear age.

President Trump issues a stern warning to North Korea after the latest missile news, saying the nation “best not make any more threats to the United States.”

In 2017 we may look for a resolution to the North Korea crisis where history repeats itself.

All through the Cold War Kennedy looked into the face of strategic MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) without blinking and then chose to evoke the better angels of our nature. At the United Nations in his first year as president (September 25, 1961) Kennedy exhorted the world’s representatives: “Together we shall save our planet – or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can. Save it we must. Then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God.”

President Trump would do well to aspire to the same.

NOTES:

Nine nuclear nations – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nine-nations-have-nuclear-weapons-here-is-how-many-each-country-has-a6827916.html

about 20 warheads – http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/791436/north-korea-nuclear-weapons-kim-jong-un-how-many

Last Cuba warheads removed – http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB449/

Iran and North Korea – http://thediplomat.com/2016/04/the-iran-north-korea-connection/

fire and fury – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/world/asia/north-korea-trump-threat-fire-and-fury.html?_r=0

United Nations speech – https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/United-Nations_19610925.aspx

WALTER CRONKITE (1916-2009), the “Most Trusted Man in America,” gives advice to the news media on what would be his 100th birthday.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: Walter Cronkite in November 1983 by photographer Bernard Gotfryd (1924-2016). Library of Congress. Public Domain.

By John P. Walsh, November 4, 2016.

INTRODUCTION

The date of November 4, 2016 is American newsman Walter Cronkite’s 100th birthday. The CBS News anchor died in 2009 at 92 years old. Employed with CBS News since 1950, Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News from April 1962 to Friday, March 6, 1981. Walter Cronkite lived by professional journalistic standards that appear to be largely out of favor in 2016.

Working in times as exhilarating and turbulent as our own, the mustached newsman came nightly into Americans’ living rooms for decades and became lionized as “the most trusted man in America” in viewer polls. This was not, in Cronkite’s case, any hollow accolade. Because of its accuracy and in-depth reporting, Cronkite’s broadcast was, after 1967 until his retirement, the top-rated news program on television.

Since grade school I have been a news junkie and, along with Cronkite’s broadcast in those same years, I frequently tuned in the nightly newscasts of Howard K. Smith at ABC (originally at CBS) and John Chancellor at NBC. To quote Bob Dylan, this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature: The Times They Are a-Changin’. In 2016 there is an obvious conflation of journalism and partisan American politics at many important media outlets, including Cronkite’s own diverse and venerable CBS News.

What, if any, is or should be the line of advocacy and objectivity in journalism? The formula promulgated in and by the media today appears ill-fitted to Cronkite’s inveterate viewpoint for the journalistic duty to objective reporting. What would centenarian Walter Cronkite say about the spectrum of media bias as practiced in 2016?

In honor of Walter Cronkite’s 100th birthday, here are Cronkite quotations germane to the subject:

I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.
SOURCE: UN Address (1999). “For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience. Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do. Those of us who are living today can influence the future of civilization. We can influence whether our planet will drift into chaos and violence, or whether through a monumental educational and political effort we will achieve a world of peace under a system of law where individual violators of that law are brought to justice.”

Our job is only to hold up the mirror – to tell and show the public what has happened.
SOURCE: November 23, 2008. https://www.dictionary-quotes.com/our-job-is-only-to-hold-up-the-mirror-to-tell-and-show-the-public-what-has-happened-walter-cronkite/

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
SOURCE:

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free or you are not free.
SOURCE:

American military journalists undergoing combat flight training for bombing missions in 1943. Left to right: Gladwin Hill, William Wade, Robert Post, Walter Cronkite, Homer Bigart, and Paul Manning. Cronkite in 1943- This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer/employee of the U.S. Government as part of official duties under terms of Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 105 of the US Code.

Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.
SOURCE: Reader’s Digest, Quotable Quotes: Wit and Wisdom from the Greatest Minds of Our Time (2012).

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.
SOURCE: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106796633 John Nichols, The Nation: Walter Cronkite America’s Anchorman, July 20, 2009. “I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that,” Cronkite told me the last time we spoke about media issues.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
SOURCE:

There’s a little more ego involved in these jobs than people might realize.
SOURCE:

I am neither a Republican nor Democrat. I am a registered independent because I find that I cast my votes not on the basis of party loyalty but on the issues of the moment and my assessment of the candidates.
SOURCE:

Walter Cronkite anchored the top-rated news broadcast from 1967 to 1981 when the mustached newsman retired. This is the title card for the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” on April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Cronkite April 4, 1968 news card-fair use-

The photo bite was invented before the sound bite.
SOURCE: Cronkite, A Reporter’s Life, 1996.

I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being non-doctrinaire, non-dogmatic, non-committed to a cause but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal. If they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they’re preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can’t be very good journalists.
SOURCE:

If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism – that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.
SOURCE:

It is not the reporter’s job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.
SOURCE:

It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.
SOURCE:

Breaking news of the assassination of President Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. CBS News Bulletin card- This image consists only of simple geometric shapes or text. It does not meet the threshold of Originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain.

CBS was ten minutes into its live broadcast of the soap opera As the World Turns when a “CBS News Bulletin” bumper slide abruptly broke into the broadcast at 1:40 pm, ten minutes after the assassination took place in Dallas.

Over this slide, Cronkite began reading what would be the first of three audio-only bulletins that were filed in the next twenty minutes: “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

Walter Cronkite in Vietnam to cover the Tet Offensive, 1968. Cronkite in Vietnam, February 20, 1968-Public Domain-NARA via WikiCommons. This image or file is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. Marine Corps.

Vietnam. Walter Cronkite and a CBS Camera crew use a jeep for a dolly during an interview with the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, during the Battle of Hue City. Cronkite Vietnam interview-Public Domain- Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. National Archives at College Park.

Walter Cronkite was so known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program. Cronkite gets a taste for moon walking at the reduced gravity simulator at NASA’s Langley Research Center in August, 1968. Moon Walking-Public Domain-NASA.gov.

Walter Cronkite reporting on television a debate during the 1976 presidential election. Cronkite on television in 1976-This work is from the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress. According to the library, there are no known copyright restrictions on the use of this work. See WikiCommons.

The ethic of the journalist is to recognize one’s prejudices, biases, and avoid getting them into print.
SOURCE:

By the 1956 campaign year the public’s fascination with television created a new phenomenon. The people frequently showed more interest in the television reporters than the candidates.
SOURCE: Cronkite, A Reporter’s Life, 1996.

Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.
SOURCE:

Walter Cronkite interviews President John F. Kennedy on Labor Day, September 2, 1963 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. (Mrs. Cronkite is in the foreground). They appeared on a special program of the CBS Evening News. Kennedy and Cronkite- Public Domain-NARA record: 4538278)

Cronkite challenged the president about the “hot war” in Vietnam which already “seems to parallel other famous debacles.” President Kennedy, citing 47 personnel killed in Vietnam, agreed that the situation was “very ominous.” Kennedy went on to say that calls to withdraw from Vietnam were “wholly wrong.”

They also discussed civil rights, including school integration and the march on Washington only days before (August 28, 1963) and the movement’s potential impact on Kennedy’s re-election chances.

Cronkite asked Kennedy what he believed were the major issues of the 1964 presidential election campaign. Kennedy replied that they were national security, education, and jobs.

The president specifically cited chronic unemployment that he believed was addressed by his tax cut and various job training programs. Also discussed was the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the U.S. signed on august 5, 1963 with Great Britain and the U.S.S.R. The treaty which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water was confirmed in the U.S. Senate afew weeks later and signed by kennedy on October 7, 1963.

Journalists pose with President Nixon on February 28, 1972, including Walter Cronkite, in Shanghai, China. (same image below, cropped).

Cronkite behind Nixon’s right shoulder in China. Nixon in China -Public Domain-NARA via WikiCommons.

Journalists Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, and Bob Schieffer interviewing President Gerald R. Ford in the Blue Room of the White House on April 21, 1975 for CBS News. Ford and Cronkite-photographer Unknown- Gerald R. Ford White House Photographs (NARA: 1756311).

Three days before Walter Cronkite’s retirement, on March 3, 1981, 65-year-old Cronkite greets 70-year-old President Ronald Reagan for an interview at the White House. There would be an assassination attempt on Reagan just a few weeks later, on March 30, 1981, in Washington, D.C. To preserve jis journalistic independence, one tactic Cronkite used was to have the journalist enter an interview from one side of a room and the interviewee (often a politician) to enter from the other. Reagan and Cronkite-Public Domain- Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, PD as official government record.

The relationship that still exists between politics and television: a standoff between an attempt to manipulate the medium and the medium’s determination not to be manipulated.
SOURCE: Cronkite, A Reporter’s Life, 1996.

Putting it as strongly as I can, the failure to give free airtime for our political campaigns endangers our democracy.
SOURCE: Free the Airwaves! (November 4, 2002). “In our country, third-party candidates throughout the years have said there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the candidates from the major parties. Well, that is clearly a campaign canard. But it may appear to be true if the public’s knowledge of the important differences between candidates is limited to what the public sees and hears on television. Putting it as strongly as I can, the failure to give free airtime for our political campaigns endangers our democracy.”

I regret that, in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation, really.
SOURCE:

We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait.
SOURCE:

Walter Cronkite congratulates graduates via video on May 11, 2007 during the Sporing convocation at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Grady Memorial Auditorium). Walter Cronkite (November 4, 1916, Saint Joseph, MO – July 17, 2009, Manhattan, New York City). “2007 Spring Convocation” by ASU_Cronkite is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

CBS newsman Walter Cronkite speaks at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington celebrating the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2004. Cronkite at NASM in 2004 -This photograph is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted”.

And that’s the way it is…
SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/18/cronkite.thats.the.way.it.is/

“”In the absence of anything else, he came up with ‘That’s the way it is.'” But that too ruffled feathers, (Sanford “Sandy”) Socolow said. “(CBS News President Richard) Salant’s attitude was, ‘We’re not telling them that’s the way it is. We can’t do that in 15 minutes,’ which was the length of the show in those days. ‘That’s not the way it is.'”Still, Cronkite persisted and that’s the way it was from then on.”

SOURCES:

http://likesuccess.com/author/walter-cronkite

http://nlcatp.org/32-famous-walter-cronkite-quotes/

http://www.azquotes.com/author/3422-Walter_Cronkite

Photograph credits:
Cronkite at NASM in 2004 -This photograph is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted”.
Cronkite in 1943- This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer/employee of the U.S. Government as part of official duties under terms of Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 105 of the US Code.
Cronkite April 4, 1968 news card-fair use-
CBS News Bulletin card- This image consists only of simple geometric shapes or text. It does not meet the threshold of Originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain.
Cronkite in Vietnam, February 20, 1968-Public Domain-NARA via WikiCommons. This image or file is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. Marine Corps.
Cronkite Vietnam interview-Public Domain- Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. National Archives at College Park.
Moon Walking-Public Domain-NASA.gov.
Cronkite on television in 1976-This work is from the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress. According to the library, there are no known copyright restrictions on the use of this work. See WikiCommons.
Kennedy and Cronkite- Public Domain-NARA record: 4538278)
Nixon in China -Public Domain-NARA via WikiCommons.
Ford and Cronkite-photographer Unknown- Gerald R. Ford White House Photographs (NARA: 1756311.
Reagan and Cronkite-Public Domain- Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, PD as official government record.
“2007 Spring Convocation” by ASU_Cronkite is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .
Cronkite at helm-Public Domain- Senior Chief Photographer’s Mate Terry A. Cosgrove – http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy_hr.asp?id=243

Cronkite at helm-Public Domain- Senior Chief Photographer’s Mate Terry A. Cosgrove – http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy_hr.asp?id=243

I don’t think people ought to believe only one news medium. They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it’s terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we’re gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television’s all you’ve got left. And that would be disastrous. We can’t cover the news in a half-hour evening event. That’s ridiculous.
SOURCE:

They never change a man who’s leading in the ratings.
SOURCE: Conversations with Cronkite: Walter Cronkite and Don Carleton, University of Texas at Austin, 2010, p. 173.

The most important thing about the [Chet]Huntley-[David]Brinkley lead is that NBC’s very alert, strong public relations and press department sold the idea that they were just dominant in the news….That claim was vastly overdrawn in relation to the actual rating difference between NBC and CBS, which was, most of the time, within one point.
SOURCE: Conversations with Cronkite: Walter Cronkite and Don Carleton, University of Texas at Austin, 2010, p. 173.

FURTHER RESOURCES:

https://www.cah.utexas.edu/collections/news_media_cronkite.php

Introduction and captions ©John P. Walsh. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, which includes but is not limited to facsimile transmission, photocopying, recording, rekeying, or using any information storage or retrieval system.

PART 3 – MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE CHICAGO FREEDOM MOVEMENT: Marches and Rallies of Summer 1966.

Leave a reply

FEATURE image: At Chicago’s City Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chicago Freedom Movement leaders, July 10, 1966. Following a speech in front of thousands at Soldier Field and a march downtown, Dr. King presented Mayor Daley with fourteen demands for a racially open city.

August 5, 2016 – by John P. Walsh.

Released on July 4, 1966 The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.¹ “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, been down, isn’t it a pity, doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city. All around, people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…”

In Chicago in 1966 Dr. King promised a summer of nonviolence but that didn’t stop a white Chicago policeman from shooting and killing a 21-year-old Puerto Rican on June 10, 1966 and sparking a riot of the victim’s neighbors who looted stores, torched squad cars and assaulted firefighters called out to quell the blazes. A month earlier Stokely Carmichael, elected by a razor-thin margin over John Lewis to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced a new Black Power movement that ended that organization’s interracial efforts.

While the Chicago Freedom Movement remained staunchly interracial King warned Daley on July 9, 1966 that the mayor’s aloofness towards fundamental improvements for African-Americans in Chicago could lead to more radical black groups making their own demands. Since black Chicagoans were, despite a fair housing ordinance, mostly restricted to the ghetto where landlords charged higher rents to a captive market, King’s allies believed open access to Chicago’s real estate market was necessary to tackle larger problems of slums, unemployment, and underprivileged schools.

Chicago, Illinois, summer 1966 (AP Photo). In the foreground is the Shangri-La with its parking garage and deck at 222 N. State Street. Billed on its matchbooks as “the world’s most romantic restaurant” the Far Eastern/Polynesian themed establishment opened in 1944 and closed in 1968. The 65-story Marina Towers (background) opened in 1963. When completed in 1968 the twin towers were both the tallest residential buildings and the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world.

Released on July 4, 1966, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.

**January 2016. Chicago. 2.42mb DSC_0075 (1)** **Author’s photograph.**

The 45‑foot fiberglass “Geronimo” statue at 63rd and Pulaski in Chicago was installed in 1966, and present during the Civil Rights marches led by Dr. King for fair housing and integration. The figure faces east toward predominantly Black neighborhoods such as Englewood, while the area west of it was then largely white and resistant to integration. Originally purchased from an Arizona reservation by the building’s owner, the statue first advertised a tobacco shop before becoming the landmark for an eye care clinic in the West Lawn neighborhood.

Mayor Richard J. Daley views the Chicago skyline in 1966 from atop the new Daley Center. Daley was focused on downtown development in the mid-1960’s and viewed King largely as an outsider with his own political agenda who simplified complex urban social problems for which Chicago was not completely at fault.

Martin Luther King Jr., with Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi in 1966. Although King saw Carmichael as a most promising young leader, in May 1966 Carmichael declared a new Black Power movement that ended the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s interracial efforts. The Chicago Freedom Movement to which King was attached stayed staunchly interracial.

Dr. King exits the tenement apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago's West Side where his family stayed in 1966

Dr. King exits the tenement apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side where his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families paid about the same in monthly rent but whites earned half as much more as what blacks earned. They found that for the same money blacks on average lived in about 15% less space (3.35 to 3.95 rooms). King looked to solve these and other socioeconomic discrepancies in his 1966 Chicago sojourn.

1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side, the redeveloped site where King and his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Screenshot October 29, 2018.

Mathias “Paddy” Bauler who in 1955 famously quipped that “Chicago ain’t ready for a reform mayor”² was still an active Northside Chicago alderman in 1966. To some Chicagoans, Bauler’s colorful quip should have been Mayor Daley’s prevailing opinion towards open housing. In July and August 1966 King’s street marches into the white-only neighborhoods of Gage Park, Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn³ were intended to showcase the Chicago Freedom Movement’s reform message of open housing.

Following a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10, 1966 where King spoke to thousands of supporters including these words, “we will no longer sit idly by in agonizing deprivation and wait on others to provide our freedom,”⁴ he then led thousands on a march to City Hall. Marching peacfully three miles from the lakefront into downtown, King posted the Chicago Freedom Movement’s fourteen demands for a racially open city at City Hall. The next day Daley met with King but the pair, who personally respected one another, floundered at an impasse.

King was impatient for direct action but Daley was passive and noncommittal. Afterwards King made clear to Daley that these were 14 demands, not suggestions. From Daley’s viewpoint, King was a public relations disaster for Chicago because he was an outsider articulating simple solutions to complex and not always only local social problems. King indicated an inclination that it was time to march into the neighborhoods.

Sunday, July 10, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a 12-page speech at a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago that drew tens of thousands of supporters of open housing, better education and increased employment opportunities for the city’s black community. Photo: the Sun-Times archives.

Martin Luther King, Jr. at Chicago Freedom Movement Rally, Soldier Field (Freedom Sunday) Dr. King is waving from back seat of the car; Bill Berry is on his left Date: July 10, 1966. “Martin Luther King, Jr. at Chicago Freedom Movement Rally, Soldier Field (Freedom Sunday)” by UIC Library Digital Collections is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

mlk_01_01_custom-89da60cf842d32abda0a2aebbf67e1134e33c3ff-s1300-c85

The crowd and Dr. King at the Chicago Freedom Movement rally on Sunday, July 10, 1966, at Soldier Field. Photograph by Bernard Kleina.

Following a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago where Dr. King addressed the crowd on Sunday, July 10, 1966, thousands marched through downtown Chicago to City Hall.

The march ended when the list of demands was nailed to the door of Chicago’s City Hall.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Chicago’s City Hall on July 10, 1966.

King met with a passive and noncommittal Daley in City Hall on Monday, July 11, 1966 (this photo, March 24, 1966). The antagonists met infrequently in 1966 to address The Chicago Freedom Movement’s issues and each time King left with vague, piecemeal promises for change.

On July 14, 1966, three days after the Daley-King meeting, a drifter named Richard Speck tortured, raped, and murdered eight female student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on the south side of Chicago. Speck, born in an Illinois farm town in 1941, lived in Dallas for the last 15 years and, running from the law there, only arrived into Chicago in April 1966. In the pall of a July heatwave, the serial killer was on the loose in the city for three days – a police sketch plastered everywhere in newspapers and on TV – until he was arrested on July 17, 1966. These gruesome killings were called “The Crime of the Century” and added panic, gloom and a general fear to an already tense city.⁵

Two weeks later, on August 1, 1966, in Austin, Texas, Charles Whitman, shot 49 victims from the bell tower of the University of Texas, killing 17 – and brought the term “mass shooting” into the American popular discourse.

These violent crimes precipitated ramped-up tension in Chicago and the nation in the hot and muggy summer of 1966. Already gripped by an escalating Vietnam War as well as massive civil rights movements, women’s rights movements, youth counter-cultural movements, and even radical church reform (“Vatican II”) movements, American society was swiftly and increasingly wrapped into a tight fist of revolutionary social change whose resistance to it tended to exacerbate the possibility of what King called “social disaster.”

Violent crimes of mass murderers Richard Speck in Chicago in midJuly 1966 and Charles Whitman in Texas in August 1966 worked to ramp-up tension people felt in Chicago during the long, hot summer of 1966.

Speck’s horrendous crimes came in the same week when Chicago police shot and killed two black Chicagoans, including a pregnant 14-year-old girl, during riots on the predominantly black West Side that Daley blamed on King. King denied any such connection and told Daley that if it wasn’t for the Chicago Freedom Movement’s preaching nonviolence those riots would have mushroomed into another Watts. To King’s way of thinking these disturbances among a swath of the city’s population should serve as the clarion call to Daley to act boldly on behalf of the black community and begin to enact the 14 demands brought to him to make Chicago a racially open city.⁶

Instead Daley’s response was to mobilize 4,000 members of the National Guard to restore law and order. In the wake of the violence—with police brutality blamed by the police on the rioters—another meeting between Daley and King took place where they agreed on a handful of reforms– (1) to establish a citizen’s advisory committee on police and community relations; (2) that grassroots workers go door to door in riot-affected areas to advise calm; and, (3) a new investment to build more swimming pools in black areas.

King was unimpressed with what he considered Daley’s lackadaisical approach and local media mocked the mayor’s feeble plan.

“Get Ready” by Smokey Robinson was recorded by The Temptations in December 1965 and released in February 1966. It landed at no.1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart and reached no. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. The up-tempo dance number was led by the falsetto of The Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks. Since The Temptations were formed in Detroit, Michigan, in 1961, the male vocal group has proven to be one of rock history’s most enduring groups who are unparalleled in their artistic and commercial success.

For his part, King started “walking,” that is, organizing marches into the city’s largely white neighborhoods adjacent to black ones so to highlight the need for open housing. KIng also re-started talks with Chicago gang members to convince them to forsake violence and join his nonviolent racially integrated movement.⁷

Since Daley viewed Chicago as having more accomplishments than problems in the area of race relations and that, further, the Mayor publicly considered the outsider King to be a selfish agitator, many white residents of soon-to-be-marched-upon city neighborhoods assumed Daley would take their side.

But Daley’s politics of law and order and incremental social change succeeded in alienating almost everyone. In the Chicago mayoral election in 1967 black voter turnout and support for Daley disappeared and did not return for him in subsequent mayoral contests in 1971 or 1975. Meanwhile, white residents felt the fatal sting of being “betrayed”⁸by the city powers as Daley did not stop the marches from going forward.

The north edge of Marquette Park in early 2016. Photograph by author.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, center, and a Chicago building janitor, Robert DeBose, left, exchange words on the eviction of two families from the building. DeBose contended the families were evicted for not paying rent. He said many of the building's problems were caused by people who refused to keep it clean.

The Rev. Martin Luther King and Chicago building janitor Robert DeBose, left, discuss the eviction of families from the building. DeBose contended the families were evicted for not paying rent. fair use.

The first march was on Saturday, July 16, 1966 when a group of 120 demonstrators marched from Englewood into Marquette Park “for a picnic.” The next day, Sunday, July 17, 1966 about 200 marchers, taunted by neighborhood whites, held a prayer vigil outside a Gage Park church. Almost two weeks later, on Thursday, July 28, 1966, protesters began an all-night vigil at 63^rdStreet and Kedzie Avenue at a realty company that systematically discriminated against black buyers looking to move into Gage Park. The realtors had been reported to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations but nothing happened. White counter demonstrators appeared and with nightfall Chicago police struck a deal for the lawful open housing (or open occupancy) protesters to file into paddy wagons for safe escort back to the ghetto.

Dr. King attended two marches in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966 and, shown here, South Deering on August 21, 1966.

Movement leaders Al Raby (left), James Bevel (second from right) and Jesse Jackson (center) protest in front of the Chicago Real Estate Board in downtown Chicago.

Chicago Lawn white hecklers during a Chicago Freedom Movement march in summer 1966.

Chicago Police in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. Their presence did not prevent severe rioting by white mobs that day.

On July 30, 1966 about 250 open housing protesters, furious about the recent night’s humiliation, looked to return to the same southwest side intersection. They were met by bottles and rocks thrown by whites so that the protesters retreated again east of Ashland Avenue into Englewood. When demonstrators marched out of Englewood again on July 31, 1966 more than 500 whites met them as the protesters crossed Ashland Avenue on 63^rd Street. Armed with cherry bombs, rocks, bricks, and bottles, the surly mob grew to over 4,000 whites where they burned cars and injured around 50 open-occupancy protesters, including a first grade teacher hit by a projectile.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago. King holds a Chicago Daily News paper with a headline that reads "City Seeks To Cut Marches.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago on August 19, 1966. King holds a Chicago Daily News with a headline that reads “City Seeks To Cut Marches.” (AP Photo/Larry Stoddard) fair use.

On August 2, 1966, Daley met with white homeowner groups from the southwest side. In addition for calling for law and order from blacks and whites, the mayor acknowledged the open housing protesters had a legal right to march. Daley, through an intermediary, sent King modest housing improvement and integration proposals which King rejected and Daley implemented anyway. Daley next sent to an embattled King some local black aldermen who opposed the Chicago Freedom Movement but carried more substantial housing and employment offers from City Hall. The city government hoped that King, who was known to be looking for a way out of Chicago with a tangible victory, might accept a negotiated pact and call an end to the campaign. With these serious talks going on between Daley and King, the late summer marches for open housing continued under an increasingly vicious white backlash.

A mob attacks a car during the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s Aug. 5, 1966march to Marquette Park shortly. Bernard Kleina

A white mob attacks a car during the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s August. 5, 1966 march to Marquette Park. Photo by Bernard Kleina.

White rioters at Clark gas station in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966.

White rioters encountering Chicago police at a Clark gas station in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. A Confederate flag is on the right. Photo by Bernard Kleina.

Whites moving east on 63rd Street to confront marchers on the way to Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. The Clark gas station in the background is the site of the photos by Bernard Kleina.

The infrastructure of the former Clark gas station still exists today on 63rd street (July 2018). Screen shot dated October 29, 2018.

3055 W. 63rd Street Chicago Oct 2015 view from the west

The old Clark gas station looking east on 63rd Street at Whipple. Screenshot October 29, 2018.

On Friday, August 5, 1966, Al Raby and Mahalia Jackson led a group of about 500 open occupancy protesters into Marquette Park in south Chicago Lawn. A white mob of over 10,000 had gathered there and verbally abused the marchers and then turned physically violent. King, who up to this point had not participated in these marches, arrived and joined the march on the north side of the park. It was here, between Francisco and Mozart Streets south of Marquette Road that Martin Luther King was struck in the head behind the right ear by a baseball-sized rock and felled to one knee.

The open housing marchers, angry and disgusted, made their way the short distance out of the park and towards 63^rd and Kedzie where King dodged a knife thrown at him. The crowd began to shout “Kill him!” as well as other racially charged epithets and about 2,500 whites now started throwing bottles, burned cars, smashed bus windows and clashed with police for the next five hours.

c201608-the-longest-march-new-friendship-baptist-church

King with (from left) Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson, and Al Raby at the New Friendship Baptist Church at 848 W 71st St in Chicago —the staging point for the 3 and a half miles walk to Marquette Park —on August 4, 1966. Photo: Chicago Tribune.

Marching south down Kedzie Avenue to Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. Bourne Chapel is located at 6541 S. Kedzie, just two blocks from the park. Today the funeral home is gone. The yellow-brick building housing Tony’s Barber Shop in 1966 is still there today, though the barber shop business is gone. Photo by Bernard Kleina.

Bourne chapel 6541 S. Kedzie Chicago July 2018.

King after being struck by a rock at the August 5 protest. PHOTO CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. falls after being struck by a rock from a taunting white mob in Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. King would also dodge a knife hurled at him in the park. King soberly reacted by saying: “Oh, I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it.”

Vandals overturn a car before the August 5 march in Marquette Park. Photograph by Jim Klepitsch.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with supporters in Marquette Park shortly after someone hurled a rock or brick that hit him in the head. Bernard Kleina

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with supporters in Marquette Park shortly after someone hurled a rock that hit him in the head. Photo by Bernard Kleina.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comments on that day’s violence entered the annals of civil rights and American history and marks a failing grade for Chicago: “I’ve been in many demonstrations across the south, but I can say I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”⁹

A permanent memorial to Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement was erected in Marquette Park on August 5, 2016 for the 50th anniversary of the Marquette Park marches. This MLK Living Memorial at 67th Street and Kedzie Avenue includes a bench to contemplate the 300 tiles created by Chicagoans of all ages representing their understanding of “Home” and representations of a diverse community who continue to work to advance Dr. King’s vision of peace and justice.

During a news conference in Chicago on Sept. 15, 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, called the 10-point open housing agreement reached with Mayor Richard Daley and other civic, business and religious leaders "a one-round victory in a 15-round battle." King had named Chicago his first target in the North for racial equality the previous winter.

“Martin Luther King, Jr.” by UIC Library Digital Collections is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In Chicago on Sept. 15, 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, characterized an open housing agreement reached with Mayor Richard Daley and civic, business and religious leaders “a one-round victory.” King had named Chicago his first target in the North for racial equality in January 1966.

NOTES:

The Lovin’ Spoonful – Hot 100″. Billboard(Nielsen) 78 (33): 22. 1966-08-13.
On Mathias “Paddy” Bauler – http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/527.html; Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman’s Memoir, Leon M. Despres and Kenan Heise, Northwestern University Press, 2005, 3.
In 1960 virtually no blacks – only 7 according to that year’s U.S. Census– lived among a white population of 100,000 in Gage Park/Chicago Lawn/Marquette Park areas – cited in American Pharoah: Mayor Richard J. Daley His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, Little Brown and Company, New York, 2000, p. 392. Fifty years after the Marquette Park march in 2016, the surrounding neighborhood of Chicago Lawn is a very different place from the all-white enclave King encountered. Whites now account for just 4.5 percent of the neighborhood’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. African-Americans make up 49 percent and Hispanics 45 percent –http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/mitchell-rev-martin-luther-king-still-bringing-us-together/- retrieved August 5, 2016.
Soldier field rally quote- http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/speech-chicago-freedom-movement-rally# – retrieved August 5, 2016.
On Speck murders – see http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-07-06/features/8602180462_1_richard-speck-cab-driver-bags – (and following) retrieved August 5, 2016; See The Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murders that Shocked the Nation,” Dennis L. Breo and William J. Martin, 2016, Skyhorse Publishing.
Results of West Side riots – American Pharoah, p. 389; Substance of 14 demands – Ibid., p. 385.
Media mock Daley’s plan and King re-engages gang members– Ibid., 389-391.
Black voter support declines – Black Politics in Chicago, William J. Grimshaw, Loyola University Presas, 1980, p. 25; whites feel “betrayed” – American Pharoah, p. 394.
American Pharoah, p. 392-396 and http://sites.middlebury.edu/chicagofreedommovement/don-rose/ – retrieved August 5, 2016.
C.T. Vivian quotation and text below- Image is Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0.) SOURCE: https://aha.confex.com/aha/2012/webprogram/Paper9589.html

Chicago public school teacher Al Raby (left) of the CCCO and Edwin “Bill” Berry (right) of the Chicago Urban League inspect the open-housing agreement reached in Chicago in late August 1966 with Ross Beatty (center) of the Chicago Real Estate Board. It contained mostly broad volunteer promises for modest integration in all Chicago neighborhoods by the end of 1967, a mayoral election year. At an August 26, 1966 meeting at a downtown hotel with King and Daley both present — and after city faith leaders promised their resolute support of the agreement — Ross Beatty only tepidly endorsed the plan: “Well,” he confessed, “we’ll do all we can, but I don’t know how I can do it.”

June 19, 2022: Video in Marquette Park in Chicago of the Living Memorial taken during my visit.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Living Memorial is on the north side of Marquette Park in Chicago where the park is bisected by busy Kedzie Avenue. It was near this location that Dr. King, as he led protesters into the park during the historic Chicago Freedom Movement march on August 5, 1966, so to protest for open housing, was struck in the head and felled to the ground by a projectile thrown at him by angry white mobs who had gathered and were throwing bottles, rocks and bricks.

The memorial was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the march (August 5, 2016). It is composed of a plaza, low seating wall, and three carved brick rectangular obelisks by artists Sonja Henderson and John Pittman Weber. The sculptural reliefs depict Dr. King and other prominent community members who marched with him that day.

If you liked this blog post , please visit Parts 1 and Part 2 in the series here:

PARTS 1 & 2 – MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE CHICAGO FREEDOM MOVEMENT: Coming to Chicago and the Start of the Campaign in 1966.

Also visit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotations Page here:

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

August 28, 1963: the 72-minute MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE OF CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS WITH PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY following the historic March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

FBI photograph of the Biograph Theater in 1934 shortly after the shooting of Public Enemy No.1, John Dillinger. Public Domain

John Dillinger mug shot. Public domain.

John Dillinger (left) with navy buds. Public domain.

3512 North Halsted, Chicago. Author’s photograph. May 2014.

1934 Green Packard. “1934 Packard” by Rennett Stowe is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Billie Frechette (1907-1969) was born on a Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. After her arrest she was tried and convicted of violating a federal law of harboring a criminal and served a two-year prison sentence without parole in a federal pen in Milan, Michigan. Public domain.

FBI wanted poster for Billie Frechette. Public Domain.

Head of the FBI case in Chicago to get Dillinger and his gang dead or alive was Melvin Purvis. Public domain.

John “Red’ Hamilton. Mug shot. Public domain.

Tavern owner James Probasco’s house at 2509 N. Crawford Road in Chicago where Dillinger underwent plastic surgery on May 28, 1934. Public domain.

Polly Hamilton. Fair use.

Wanted poster: John Dillinger, published by U.S. Department of Justice. Public domain. Special Collections at Wofford College “[Recto] Wanted poster: John Dillinger, published by U.S. Department of Justice” by Special Collections at Wofford College is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Anna Sage, “the woman in red” who set up John Dillinger to be shot outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. Public domain.

Share this:

The Fall of Manhattan and the Jersey Chase

British Confidence and the “Undisciplined Rabble”

The Captive General and the Low Ebb of the War

Thomas Paine and the Times That Try Men’s Souls

A Sober Assessment from Washington

The Sustained Campaign (1776–1783)

The Shifting Tide: From Despair to Strategic Defiance

Turning the Tables on the Empire

The Glorious Accomplishment

Share this:

Early Life and Foundations

Entering the Civil Rights Arena

Evaluating Black Power and the Christian Faith

The Urban Training Center and “The Plunge”

Authoring the Post-King Era

Theological Leadership and Community Banking

A Legacy of Youth Leadership and National Honors

Nonviolence was both strategy and transformation. Rev. C.T. Vivian presents nonviolence as a source of power that confronts fear with courage and hate with love while simultaneously creating a new social order.

Martin Luther King Jr. elevated civil rights into a moral issue. According to Rev. Vivian, Dr. King moved the struggle beyond economics and politics and placed it within a moral and spiritual framework.

Racism was created to justify injustice. C.T. Vivian believed that racism developed as a rationalization for slavery and exploitation, allowing Americans to reconcile oppression with their conscience.

The larger problem was white society and its institutions. Drawing on Gunnar Myrdal, Rev. Vivian contends that America did not have a “Negro problem” but a “white problem,” requiring change in majority attitudes and institutions.

The Black freedom struggle was about dignity, not merely economics. Vivian argues that Black Americans sought “dignity, not dollars; manhood, not money; pride, not prosperity.” The movement was fundamentally a human and moral struggle.

Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere threatens everyone: “When there is no justice for ALL, then there is no justice at all.”

Legal victories alone were insufficient. Court decisions and legislation mattered, but Rev. Vivian argues they often failed to produce meaningful changes in everyday Black life.

Share this:

Kennedy’s Reaction to the March

Civil Rights Priorities

The Debate Over Federal Action

In the tension between moral urgency and political pragmatism, civil rights leaders pressed Kennedy to act more boldly, while Kennedy focused on the difficult realities of congressional politics and bipartisan support.

Reuther Challenges the President

Rev. Eugene Blake and the Eisenhower Idea

Harry Belafonte and Hollywood at the March on Washington

A Life of Achievement and Activism

Bringing Hollywood to History

The March on Washington

Hollywood Stars in Attendance

Meeting with President Kennedy

A Lasting Legacy

Share this:

INTRODUCTION. by John P. Walsh

Chief Joseph and the Wallowa Valley

The Nez Percé Before White Contact

Horses and the Transformation of Nez Percé Culture

First Encounters With Europeans

Missionaries, Christianity, and Growing Divisions

Treaties, Gold, and Broken Promises

Chief Joseph Takes Leadership

Mounting Tensions and Federal Intervention

The Deadline and the Outbreak of War

Early Nez Percé Victories

The Fighting Retreat

The Flight Toward Canada

The Final Siege and Surrender

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Nuclear crises remain among the greatest dangers facing humanity because several nations possess nuclear weapons, including North Korea.

Nine nations stockpile around 16,300 nuclear weapons. The U.S. possesses less than half of them.

Kennedy prepared for war but consistently avoided taking actions that would trigger either conventional or nuclear conflict.

Kennedy’s example demonstrates that strength can be expressed through successful conflict avoidance, not merely through military action.

Effective leadership in a nuclear crisis depends on cool-headed judgment, patience, and a careful balance of “carrot and stick” diplomacy.

Kennedy avoided war –and was almost impeached for it.

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions presented a challenge requiring both deterrence and diplomacy rather than reckless escalation. The United States has an obligation to protect its allies while preventing a wider regional or global catastrophe.

Trump should aspire to Kennedy’s commitment to peace and responsible statesmanship in the nuclear age.

Share this:

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION.
by John P. Walsh